Conference: The William Rowan Hamilton Geometry and Topology Workshop

This award supports U.S. based students and early career researchers in attending The William Rowan Hamilton Geometry and Topology Workshop 30 June–4 July 2025 at the The Hamilton Mathematics Institute, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. This five-day directed workshop will be a major international event, one of the largest ever assembled in the field of geometric group theory with 200 participants from around the world.

There are 22 confirmed speakers, featuring many leaders of the field and allied areas, and ranging from senior figures to leading early-career researchers. The conference will present an unrivaled opportunity for researchers to interact with their peers from around the globe, will orient future research directions, will further US, Irish, and, European collaboration, will broaden access to mathematics, and will improve interdisciplinary collaboration.

The first major theme of this workshop will be geometric group theory, with a focus on current areas of great interest including nonpositive curvature, automorphisms of free groups and related groups, and profinite rigidity. The second major theme of this workshop will be to elucidate connections between geometric group theory and other areas of mathematics.

Examples include: low-dimensional topology for example via the work of Agol and Wise on the Virtual Haken Conjecture and cube complexes; geometry and number theory for example via the work of Reid on arithmetic lattices in rank-1 Lie groups; and computer science for example via the work of Lubotzky on high-dimensional expanders.

The conference web page is at:

www.maths.ox.ac.uk/groups/topology/william-rowan-hamilton-geometry-and-topology-workshop-celebrating-martin-bridsons-60th-birthday

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.