Mathematical relativity is a very widely ranging area of mathematical study, spanning differential geometry, elliptic and hyperbolic PDE, and dynamical systems. We introduce in this workshop some of the leading areas of current interest associated with problems in cosmology, the theory of black holes, and the geometry and physics of the Cauchy problem (initial data constraints and evolution) for the Einstein equations.

The introductory workshop serves as an overview to the overlying programmatic theme. It aims to familiarize graduate students, postdocs, and non-experts to major and new topics of the current program. Though the audience is expected to have a general mathematical background, knowledge of technical terminology and recent findings is not assumed.

Ever since the epic work of Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat on the well-posedness of Einstein's equations initiated the mathematical study of general relativity, women have played an important role in many areas of mathematical relativity. In this workshop, some of the leading women researchers in mathematical relativity present their work.

The workshop is intended to give an overview of the research landscape surrounding optimal transportation, including its connections to geometry, design applications, and fully nonlinear partial differential equations.

As such, it will feature some survey lectures or minicourses by distinguished visitors and/or a few of the organizers of the theme semester, amounting to a kind of summer school. These will be complemented by a sampling of research lectures and short presentations from a spectrum of invited guests and other participants, including some who attended the previous week's {\em Connections for Women} workshop.

The introductory workshop aims to familiarize graduate students, postdocs, and non-experts to major and new topics of the current program. Though the audience is expected to have a general mathematical background, knowledge of technical terminology and recent findings is not assumed.

This two-day event aims to connect women graduate students and beginning researchers with more established female researchers who use optimal transportation in their work and can serve as professional contacts and potential role-models. As such, it will showcase a selection of lectures featuring female scientists, both established leaders and emerging researchers.

These lectures will be interspersed with networking and social events such as lunch or tea-time discussions led by successful researchers about (a) the particular opportunities and challenges facing women in science---including practical topics such as work-life balance and choosing a mentor, and (b) promising new directions in optimal transportation and related topics. Junior participants will be paired with more senior researchers in mentoring groups, and all participants will be encouraged to stay for the Introductory Workshop the following week, where they will have the opportunity to propose a short research communication.

The workshop will examine the interplay between measures of singularities coming both from characteristic p methods of commutative algebra, and invariants of singularities coming from birational algebraic geometry. There is a long history of this interaction which arises via the "reduction to characteristic p" procedure. It is only in the last few years, however, that very concrete objects from both areas, namely generalized test ideals from commutative algebra and multiplier ideals from birational geometry, have been shown to be intimately connected. This workshop will explore this connection, as well as other topics used to study singularities such as jets schemes and valuations.

In recent years there have been increasing interactions between noncommutative algebra/representation theory on the one hand and algebraic geometry on the other. This workshop would aim to examine these interactions and, as importantly, to encourage the interactions between the three areas. The precise topics will become more precise nearer the time, but will certainly include:

Noncommutative algebraic geometry; Noncommutative resolutions of singularities and Calabi-Yau algebras; Symplectic reflection and related algebras; D-module theory; Deformation-quantization
 

The workshop will focus on recent breakthroughs in understanding and applications of free resolutions and on interactions of commutative algebra and representation theory, where algebraic geometry often appears as a third player. A specific goal is to stimulate further interaction between these fields.

This workshop will provide several short lecture series consisting two or three lectures each to introduce postdocs, graduate students and non-experts to some of the major themes of the conference. While the precise topics may change to reflect developments in the area, it is likely that we will run mini-series in the following subjects:

Noncommutative algebraic geometry; D-Module Theory; Derived Categories; Noncommutative Resolutions of Singularities; Deformation-Quantization; Symplectic Reflection Algebras; Growth Functions of Infinite Dimensional Algebras.

The Connections for Women workshop associated to the MSRI program in noncommutative algebraic geometry and representation theory is intended to bring together women who are working in these areas in all stages of their careers.

As the first event in the semester, this workshop will feature a "tapas menu" of current research and open questions: light but intriguing tastes, designed to encourage further exploration and interest. Talks will be aimed at a fairly general audience and will cover diverse topics within the theme of the program. In addition, there will be a poster session for graduate students and recent PhD recipients and a panel discussion on career issues, as well as free time for informal discussion.

This workshop on Combinatorial Commutative Algebra aims to bring together researchers studying toric algebra and degenerations, simplicial objects such as monomial ideals and Stanley-Reisner rings, and their connections to tropical geometry, algebraic statistics, Hilbert schemes, D-modules, and hypergeometric functions.

Cluster algebras provide a unifying algebraic/combinatorial framework for a wide variety of phenomena in settings as diverse as quiver representations, Teichmuller theory, Poisson geometry, Lie theory, discrete integrable systems, and polyhedral combinatorics.

The workshop aims at presenting a broad view of the state-of-the-art understanding of the role of cluster algebras in all these areas, and their interactions with each other.

This workshop will take place at the opening of the MSRI special programs on Commutative Algebra and on Cluster Algebras. It will feature lecture series at different levels, to appeal to a wide variety of participants. There will be minicourses on the basics of cluster algebras, and others developing particular aspects of cluster algebras and commutative algebra.

This workshop will present basic notions from Commutative Algebra and Cluster Algebras, with a particular focus on providing background material. Additionally, the workshop aims to encourage and facilitate the exchange of ideas between researchers in Commutative Algebra and researchers in Cluster Algebras.

The field of random media has been the object of intensive mathematical research over the last thirty years. It covers a variety of models, mainly from condensed matter physics, physical chemistry, and geology, where one is interested in materials which have defects or inhomogeneities. These features are taken into account by letting the medium be random. It has been found that this randomness can cause very unexpected effects in the large scale behavior of these models; on occasion these run contrary to the prevailing intuition. A feature of this area, which it has in common with other areas of statistical physics, is that what was initially thought to be just a simple toy model has turned out to be a major mathematical challenge.

Our understanding of the scaling limits of discrete statistical systems has shifted in recent years from the physicists' field-theoretical approaches to the more rigorous realm of probability theory and complex analysis. The aim of this workshop is to combine both discrete and continuous approaches, as well as the statistical physics/combinatorial and the probabilistic points of view. Topics include quantum gravity, planar maps, discrete conformal analysis, SLE, and other statistical models such as loop gases.

Over the last ten years there has been spectacular progress in the understanding of geometrical properties of random processes. Of particular importance in the study of these complex random systems is the aspect of their phase transition (in the wide sense of an abrupt change in macroscopic behavior caused by a small variation in some parameter) and critical phenomena, whose applications range from physics, to the performance of algorithms on networks, to the survival of a biological species.

Recent advances in the scope of rigorous scaling limits for discrete random systems, most notably for 2D systems such as percolation and the Ising model via SLE, have greatly contributed to the understanding of both the critical geometry of these systems and the behavior of dynamical stochastic processes modeling their evolution. While some of the techniques used in the analysis of these systems are model-specific, there is a remarkable interplay between them. The deep connection between percolation and interacting particle systems such as the Ising and Potts models has allowed one model to successfully draw tools and rigorous theory from the other.

The aim of this workshop is to share and attempt to push forward the state-of-the-art understanding of the geometry and dynamic evolution of these models, with a main focus on percolation, the random cluster model, Ising and other interacting particle systems on lattices.

Research at the interface of lattice statistical mechanics and combinatorial problems of ``large sets" has been and exciting and fruitful field in the last decade or so. In this workshop we plan to develop a broad spectrum of methods and applications, spanning the spectrum from theoretical developments to the numerical end. This will cover the behaviour of lattice models at a macroscopic level (scaling limits at criticality and their connection with SLE) and also at a microscopic level (combinatorial and algebraic structures), as well as efficient enumeration techniques and Monte Carlo algorithms to generate these objects.

This 2-day workshop will bring together researchers from discrete mathematics, probability theory, theoretical computer science and statistical physics to explore topics at their interface. The focus will be on combinatorial structures, probabilistic algorithms and models that arise in the study of physical systems. This will include the study of phase transitions, probabilistic combinatorics, Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, and random structures and randomized algorithms.

Since discrete lattice models stand at the interface of these fields, the workshop will start with background talks in each of the following three areas: Statistical and mathematical physics; Combinatorics of lattice models; Sampling and computational issues. These talks will describe the general framework and recent developments in the field and will be followed with shorter talks highlighting recent research in the area.

The workshop will celebrate academic and gender diversity, bringing together women and men at junior and senior levels of their careers from mathematics, physics and computer science.

Geometric problems which are inherently quantitative occur in various aspects of theoretical computer science, including
a) Algorithmic tasks for geometric questions such as clustering and proximity data structures.
b) Geometric methods in the design of approximation algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems, including the analysis of semidefinite programs and embedding methods.
c) Geometric questions arising from computational complexity, particularly in hardness of approximation. These include isoperimetric and Fourier analytic problems. These include isoperimetric and Fourier analytic problems.

This workshops aims to present recent progress in these directions.

This workshop is devoted to various kinds of embeddings of metric spaces into Banach spaces, including biLipschitz embeddings, uniform embeddings, and coarse embeddings, as well as linear embeddings of finite dimensional spaces into low dimensional $\ell_p^n$ spaces. There will be an emphasis on the relevance to geometric group theory, and an exploration into the use of metric differentiation theory to effect embeddings.

"Probabilistic Reasoning in Quantitative Geometry" refers to the use of probabilistic techniques to prove geometric theorems that do not have any a priori probabilistic content. A classical instance of this approach is the probabilistic method to prove existence of geometric objects (examples include Dvoretzky's theorem, the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma, and the use of expanders and random graphs for geometric constructions). Other examples are the use of probabilistic geometric invariants in the local theory of Banach spaces (sums of independent random variables in the context of type and cotype, and martingale-based invariants), the more recent use of such invariants in metric geometry (e.g., Markov type in the context of embedding and extension problems), probabilistic tools in group theory, the use of probabilistic methods to prove geometric inequalities (e.g., maximal inequalities, singular integrals, Grothendieck inequalities), the use of probabilistic reasoning to prove metric embedding results such as Bourgain's embedding theorem (where the embedding is deterministic, but its analysis benefits from a probabilistic interpretation), probabilistic interpretations of curvature and their applications, and the use of probabilistic arguments in the context of isoperimetric problems (e.g., Gaussian, rearrangement, and transportation cost methods).

Quantitative Geometry deals with geometric questions in which quantitative or asymptotic considerations occur. The workshop will provide a mathematical introduction, a foretaste, of the many themes this exciting topic comprises: geometric group theory, theory of Lipschitz functions, large scale and coarse geometry, embeddings of metric spaces, quantitative aspects of Banach space theory, geometric measure theory and of isoperimetry, and more.

This workshop will provide an introduction to the program on Quantitative Geometry. There will be several short lecture series, given by speakers chosen for the accessibility of their lectures, designed to introduce non-specialists or students to some of the major themes of the program.

Our workshop will highlight some work relevant to or carried out during our program at the MSRI, including statistical results about ranks for elliptic curves, zeros of L-functions, curves over finite fields, as well as algorithms for L-functions, point counting, and automorphic forms.

Many problems in physics, industry, finance, biology, and other areas can be described by partial differential equations that exhibit apriori unknown sets, such as interfaces, moving boundaries, shocks, etc. The study of such sets, also known as free boundaries, often occupies a central position in such problems. The main objective of the workshop is to bring together experts in various theoretical an applied aspects of free boundary problems.

Our Introductory Workshop will focus largely on the background, recent work, and current problems regarding: Selmer groups and Mordell-Weil groups, and the distribution of their ranks (and "sizes") over families of elliptic curves, including recent work of Manjul Bhargava and Arul Shankar where they have shown that the average size of the 2-Selmer group of an elliptic curve over Q is 3, and thereby obtains information about the average rank of Mordell-Weil groups; related work on the asymptotics of number fields; certain natural families of L-functions, and the statistical distribution of their zeros and values; complementary algorithmic methods and experimental results regarding L-functions, automorphic forms, elliptic curves and number fields; the statistical behavior of eigenvalues of Frobenius elements in Galois representations.


 

The format of this 2-day workshop will be colloquium-style presentations that will introduce some of the major topics touched on by the "Arithmetic Statistics" program. They will be pitched so as to be understandable to researchers with a variety of mathematical backgrounds. The talks are designed broadly as a lead-in to the program's initial workshop (taking place the following week) and will include topics such as the Sato-Tate conjecture, random matrix theory, and enumeration of number fields. The purpose will be to provide background but also to present the exciting areas where progress is happening fast, where major problems have been solved, or where there are significant open questions that need to be tackled. With this we aim to provide motivation for the Connections participants to involve themselves with the remainder of the program.

 

Many problems in physics, industry, finance, biology, and other areas can be described by partial differential equations that exhibit a priori unknown sets, such as interfaces, moving boundaries or shocks for example. The study of such sets, also known as free boundaries, often plays a central role in the understanding of such problems. The aim of this workshop is to introduce several free boundary problems arising in completely different areas.

Contributions of women working in areas related to free boundary problems will be presented. It will include survey lectures on current problems and on standard techniques used in this field, as well as more specific new results of individual researchers. One of the major goals besides the scientific aspect, is to encourage women mathematicians to interact and to build networks. It addresses also to graduate students who are very welcome. A discussion on women’s experiences in the mathematical community should help them to find their way in their mathematical career.

 

Inverse Problems are problems where causes for a desired or an observed effect are to be determined. They lie at the heart of scientific inquiry and technological development. Applications include a number of medical as well as other imaging techniques, location of oil and mineral deposits in the earth's substructure, creation of astrophysical images from telescope data, finding cracks and interfaces within materials, shape optimization, model identification in growth processes, and modelling in the life sciences.
The speakers in the workshop will cover a broad range of the most recent developments in the theory and applications of inverse problems.





 

Sponsor: Hayashibara Foundation




Symplectic geometry originated as a mathematical language for Hamiltonian mechanics, but during the last 3 decades it witnessed both, spectacuar development of the mathematical theory and discovery of new connections and applications to physics. Meanwhile, non-commutative geometry naturally entered into this picture.

One of the successes of tropical geometry is its applications to a number of different areas of recently developing mathematics. Among these are enumerative geometry, symplectic field theory, mirror symmetry, dimer models/random surfaces, amoebas and algas, instantons, cluster varieties, and tropical compactifications. While these fields appear quite diverse, we believe the common meeting ground of tropical geometry will provide a basis for fruitful interactions between participants.

This workshop is to lay the foundations for the upcoming program. Mini-courses comprising lectures and exercise/discussion sessions will cover the foundational aspects of tropical geometry as well as its connections with adjacent areas: symplectic geometry, several complex variables, algebraic geometry (in particular enumerative and computational aspects) and geometric combinatorics. The mini-courses will be augmented by research talks on current tropical develpoments to open the scene and set up new goals in the beginning semester.

The aim of this workshop is to introduce advanced graduate students and postdocs to tropical geometry. Various aspects of this multi-faceted field will be highlighted in two short-courses comprising lectures and exercise/discussion sessions as well as in research talks. The workshop will thus provide the participants with
an excellent introduction to the forthcoming events of the program. The scientific part will be complemented by a round table discussion on career issues of female mathematicians.

This workshop aims both to introduce
people to a broad swath of the field
and to frame its most important problems.
Each day will be organized around a
basic topic, such as how to count holomorphic
curves with boundary on a Lagrangian submanifold (which
leads to various versions of Floer theory)
or how to understand the general structure of
symplectic and contact manifolds.
There will also be an introduction to the
analytic and algebraic aspects of symplectic
field theory, and a discussion of some applications.

This will form a bridge between
the graduate student workshop which will just be ending and
the Introductory workshop. After some
elementary talks describing some of the main questions
in the field, there will be an extended discussion session
intended to explain basic concepts to those unfamiliar with the area.
There will also be an opportunity for young researchers in the field
to present their work, and an evening social event.

This workshop will bring together researchers interested in the topology of stratified spaces. It will focus roughly on four topics: topology of complex varieties, signature theory on singular spaces, L² and intersection cohomology, and mixed Hodge theory and singularities. Aside from talks on current research, there will be a series of introductory lectures on these themes. These talks will be aimed at strengthening the connections among the various topology research groups and the connections between topology researchers and researchers at the program on Analysis of Singular Spaces, running concurrently.

Complex physical, biological, geophysical and environmental systems display variability over a broad range of spatial and temporal scales. To make progress in understanding and modelling such systems, a combination of computational, analytical, and experimental techniques is required. There are issues that emerge prominently in each of these categories and in all these stochastic methods are playing a fundamental role.

Mirror duality has demonstrated the striking effectiveness of concepts of modern physics in enuerative geometry. It is of the same type as the simple radius inversion duality seen in string compactifications on S1. This type was discovered early because it shows up in every term in the string genus expansion and can be studied in 2d conformal field theory.

This workshop is jointly sponsored by MSRI and CRM and will be held at the Banff International Research Station in Banff, Canada.

NOTE: This workshop is to be held at the International House Berkeley on the UC Berkeley campus, at 2299 Piedmont Avenue.

The purpose of this program is to introduce new topological concepts in physics to young research mathematicians from both South and North America. The lectures given during the first week will provide the necessary background; these will be supplemented, primarily during the second week, with lectures by leading researchers on recent progress. That week serves as the Opening Workshop for the MSRI program, Spring, 2006, in New Topological Structures in Physics.

NOTE: This workshop is to be held at the International House on the UC Berkeley campus, at 2299 Piedmont Avenue. On site registration for the workshop will be at the International House, starting at 8:30 AM Monday and ending at 3:30 PM Monday.

NOTE: This workshop is to be held at the International House on the UC Berkeley campus, at 2299 Piedmont Avenue, except for the Tuesday session, which will be held at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. On site registration for the workshop will start at 8:30 AM Monday and end at 3:30 PM Monday.

This workshop seeks to bring together (a) mathematicians studying the math
properties of particular models, and (b) experts in various network
fields who can survey the successes and challenges of modeling within
their field.

This workshop is aimed at faculty who wish to learn about this exciting field and would like to enrich a variety of undergraduate courses with new examples and applications. The workshop is being held in collaboration with the Mathematical Association of America as part of the MAA's Professional Enhancement Program (PREP). See the PREP website for information about registration and participant support.

The topics of this workshop include phase transitions in connection to
random graphs, boolean functions, satisfiability problems, coding,
reconstruction on trees and spinglasses.

Special focus will be given to the study of the interplay
between the replica method, local weak convergence and algorithmic aspects of
reconstruction.

Recent years have seen the rapid development of techniques for the analysis of MCMC algorithms, with applications in all the above areas. These techniques draw from a wide range of mathematical disciplines, including combinatorics, discrete probability, functional analysis, geometry and statistical physics, and there has been significant cross-fertilization between them. This workshop aims to bring together practitioners from all these domains with the aim of furthering this interplay of ideas.

MSRI Program on Probability, Algorithms and Statistical Physics, Spring 2005 --- OPENING DAY, Thursday 13 January, 2005

This workshop will be part of MSRI's Special Semester in Hyperplane Arrangements and Applications.

This workshop will focus on the following topics: Characteristic varieties and resonance varieties, homotopy types of arrangements, moduli of arrangements, Gauss-Manin connections, KZ and qKZ equations, elliptic hypergeometric functions, and hypergeometric functions associated with curves of arbitrary genus.

LOCATION: The Banff Conference Centre, Banff, Canada

To be held at the Banff International Research Station in Banff, Alberta, Canada.

Presented jointly with IPAM, and held in Los Angeles. See IPAM website for details.

To be held at the Banff Conference Centre in Banff (Alberta), Canada

The first week will focus on Infinite-dimensional Algebras, Conformal Field Theory and Integrable Systems, and the second week would be devoted to Supersymmetry in Mathematics and Physics.

Discussion of the important developments in the geometric Langlands correspondence in the last few years

The field of algebraic stacks has gathered a huge momentum and is bound to become one of the main tools of the working mathematician.

The purpose of the workshop will be to bring together people working on different aspects of inverse problems, to appraise the current status of development of the field, and to encourage interaction between mathematicians and scientists and engineers working directly with the applications.

This workshop will concentrate on several topics in representation theory and geometric analysis of homogeneous spaces for which techniques in integral geometry play a key role.

see program webpage at http://zeta.msri.org/calendar/programs/ProgramInfo/52/show_program

see program webpage at http://zeta.msri.org/calendar/programs/ProgramInfo/51/show_program

This workshop will focus on problems of a scattering theoretic nature for geometric operators on manifolds with asymptotically regular
geometries, and also on spectral theory and related questions of invertibility of such operators on singular spaces. The emphasis will be on the consideration of new problems and the dissemination of new techniques.

This meeting will be joint for the first two days with the MSRI workshop on Quantization and Non-commutative Geometry, and during the three-day period April 29 - May 1 will function as a closing conference for the 2000-01 MSRI program on Operator Algebras.

These two topics have been scheduled in a joint workshop because the confluence of their research is likely to influence future advances in both fields.

This workshop will study the spectral theory of geometric operators, including: spectral invariants, applications in conformal geometry, classification of 4-manifolds, index theory and scattering theory.

The Free Probability section of the workshop will cover several aspects of the subject: applications to von Neumann algebras and C*-algebras of free product type, connections with random matrix theory, free stochastic processes and free stochastic integration, combinatorial approach via noncrossing partitions, free entropy.

The Non-commutative Banach Space section will cover the central concepts of the recently developed theory of operator spaces such as: exactness, local reflexivity and injectivity with applications to C* tensor products, operator algebras and operator modules. The non-commutative Lp-spaces, which play an important role in this theory, provide many points of contact with free probability.

This workshop will focus on the development of explicit and computational methods in arithmetic
geometry, as well as the complexity analysis of existing algorithms.

These two areas have had a strong interaction in the last two decades, leading to exciting and closely related mathematics.

This workshop will focus on number-theoretic aspects of cryptography, and will be cross-cultural, where the the cultures in question are "mathematics" and "computer science."

As part of the full-year 2000-2001 program on Operator Algebras, MSRI will host a one-week NATO
ADVANCED RESEARCH WORKSHOP on Simple C*-algebras and Non-commutative Dynamical
Systems, September 25-29, 2000.

This workshop introduces graduate students and other scientists to the exciting area of Operator
Algebras.

This workshop will have lecture series covering the basic areas of algorithmic number theory,
aimed at graduate students and mathematicians without extensive experience in the field.

For more information about this event, please see the original web page at:
http://www.msri.org/activities/programs/9900/noncomm/hopfalg/index.html

For more information about this conference, please visit the original web page at
http://msri.org/activities/programs/9900/noncomm/vonneumann/

Please see the workshop web page at http://www.msri.org/activities/programs/9899/random/qc/ for more information.