Conference: Riverside Geometric Group Theory Workshop 2025

Riverside Geometric Group Theory Workshop (RivGGT) 2025 will be held on May 9–12, 2025 at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA. This conference will focus on emerging research in geometric group theory, with a special emphasis on training early-career researchers and graduate students. It builds on the success of the 2023 and 2024 workshops, offering an in-depth, expository format through a series of lectures that explore cutting-edge topics in geometric group theory.

Geometric group theory is a dynamic area of mathematics, contributing to the understanding of various mathematical structures by studying groups through their geometric properties. The RivGGT 2025 conference provides a platform for young researchers, especially graduate students, to engage with these topics in a deeper and more substantial way. The format includes three series of four lectures by early-career researchers, each focused on a major area of recent breakthroughs.

This conference will significantly contribute to professional development by providing participants with comprehensive introductions to active areas of research, making the content accessible to a broad audience. It also fosters collaboration and mentorship, aligning with the National Science Foundation’s mission to promote the progress of science and advance national welfare by investing in future generations of scientists.

The conference will center on recent advances in geometric group theory, with lectures from Harrison Bray, Dídac Martínez-Granado, and Jenya Sapir. The focus will be on geometric and dynamical techniques applied to areas such as hyperbolic groups, Teichmüller spaces, and geodesic currents. For instance, Sapir’s work will cover the behavior of closed geodesics on surfaces and its connections to counting problems in hyperbolic geometry.

Bray will explore geometric structures on manifolds through dynamical and analytic methods, while Martínez-Granado will present generalizations of geodesic currents to hyperbolic groups acting on R-trees. Graduate student talks will introduce these minicourses, and there will be ample opportunities for participants to share their ideas and foster collaborations.

Proceedings from the conference will be published. Webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/rivggt25/home

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.