Organizers: Spyros Alexakis (U of T), Walter Craig (McMaster University), Robert
Haslhofer (U of T), Spiro Karigiannis (University of Waterloo), Aaron Naber
(Northwestern University), McKenzie Wang (McMaster University)
Participants at the Workshop on Mean Curvature Flow and Ricci Flow • November 6-10, 2017
resulted in fruitful
interaction. Just on
the mathematics
side of things,
there were
three Bôcher
Memorial Prize
winners, a Veblen
Prize winner, and a Fields medallist. The
participants from physics were also very
distinguished. A typical comment was "One
of the best conferences I have been to in
many years, with an astonishing quality
of lectures." The meeting resulted
in many published papers.
"I really enjoyed the
interaction between different fields; I
learned a lot from the mathematicians,
and I hope the mathematicians were
interested in the physical motivatio ns
we (physicists) tried to provide."
—Participant at the Workshop on
General Relativity & AdS/CFT
The Workshop on Mean Curvature
Flow and Ricci Flow was held from
November 6 to 10 with an associated
mini‑school held immediately
prior to it, on November 4 and 5.
This mini‑school featured two
five‑hour courses delivered by
teams of leading researchers in
the field. The first, delivered jointly by
Lu Wang (Wisconsin) and Jacob Bernstein
(Johns Hopkins) gave a nice overview of
the recent theory of entropy under mean
curvature flow. The second, delivered jointly by
Dan Knopf (Texas at Austin) and Richard Bamler
(Berkeley) described the recent progress on
Ricci flow through singularities, including
recent breakthroughs in dimension three.
The workshop commenced with two lectures
by Bruce Kleiner (NYU) and Richard Bamler
(Berkeley) on their spectacular uniqueness result
for 3d weak Ricci flow, which has far‑reaching
applications in geometry and topology, in
particular a proof of the generalized Smale
conjecture. The question of weak Ricci flow is
currently a very hot topic, and two further exciting
approaches based on stochastic analysis and
optimal transport were described in a colourful
talk by Esther Cabezas-Rivas (Frankfurt) and an
overview talk by Karl-Theodor Sturm (Bonn).
GAP 2017: Curvature Flows in Complex
Geometry. This affiliated event funded
separately by the Fields and Perimeter
Institutes was held in early December and
featured four-hour mini-courses from each of
three distinguished speakers: Jeffrey Streets
(Irvine), Ben Weinkove (Northwestern),
and Xiangwen Zhang (Irvine), on geometric
curvature flows arising in complex geometry.
Two weekly seminars for program participants
were initiated immediately after the end of
"Quintic_1" by Floriang, used under CC BY 2.0
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