SEAM XVII

The University of Georgia
Athens, Georgia
March 2 - 3, 2001

(last update: February 22, 2001, including maps and scheduling of 20-minute talks)

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Each day, the meeting will feature two main lectures and parallel sessions of 20-minute talks. There will be a banquet at 7 PM Friday, March 2, and a barbeque at Kevin Clancey's house at 6 PM on Saturday, March 3.

The cost of the banquet is $25; there are no other conference fees.


Rides from Atlanta Airport

The following people renting cars at the Atlanta airport are willing to give other conference participants rides to Athens.
 
Name Atlanta Arrival Time e-mail address
Alex Richman 6:30 PM  Thursday richman@math.purdue.edu

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Maps

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Conference Schedule

All talks will be held in the Boyd Graduate Studies Building, which houses the Mathematics Department and the Science Library

Friday, March 2, 2001

8:15 - 8:45
Room 409
  Coffee and Doughnuts
8:45 - 9:00
Room 328
  Welcoming Remarks
9:00 - 10:00
Room 328
  John McCarthy's First Lecture:
  Pick's theorem - What's the Big Deal?
10:00 - 10:30
Room 409
  Break
10:30 - 12:00
  20-Minute Talks
 
Session A, Room 304
Chair: Wogen
Session B, Room 322
Chair: Tie
10:30
Curto
Lacey
11:00
Dritschel
Matheson
11:30
Spitkovsky
Rybkin
12:00 - 1:30
        Lunch
1:30 - 2:30
Room 328
  Guoliang Yu's First Lecture:
  Large Scale Geometry of Groups
2:30 - 3:00
Room 409
  Break
3:30 - 5:00
  20-Minute Talks
Session C, Room 302
Chair: Clancey
Session D, Room 303
Chair: Gootman
Session E, Room 304
Chair: Azoff
3:30
Adams
Daughtry
Biswas
4:00
Bolotnikov
Fialkow
Chartrand
4:30
McCullough
Jamison
Hu
7:00
  Banquet at Trump's Restaurant, 247 E. Washington Street, Downtown Athens

Saturday, March 3, 2001

8:30 - 9:00
Room 409
  Coffee and Doughnuts
9:00 - 10:00
Room 328
  John McCarthy's Second Lecture:
  Generalizations of Pick's Theorem
10:00 - 10:30
Room 409
  Break
10:30 - 12:00
  20-Minute Talks
Session F, Room 302
Chair: Yang
Session G, Room 303
Chair: Wang
Session H, Room 304
Chair: Paulsen
10:30
Richman
Hopenwasser
Prajitura
11:00
Trent
Krishnan
Prokhorov
11:30
Zhao
Pasnicu
Wu
12:00 - 1:30
   Lunch
1:30 - 2:30
Room 328
  Guoliang Yu's Second Lecture:  Novikov's Conjecture
2:30 - 3:00
Room 409
  Break
3:30 - 5:00
20-Minute Talks
 
Session I, Room 302
Chair:  Solazzo
Session J, Room 304
Chair: Ball 
3:30
Bindner
Mihalia
4:00
Feldman
Rovnyak
4:30
Miller
Yang
6:00
  Barbeque at Kevin Clancey's House, 142 Thornhill Drive, Athens

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Banquet

This will be held at 7 PM Friday at the Trumps Catering Facility, which is located a few blocks from the Holiday Inn.  The format will be buffet style, including the following menu items:
 

Whole Bone in Glazed Ham
Southern Fried Chicken Tenderloin
Cheese-Filled Tortellini Alfredo
Layered Tomato and Vidalia Onion Salad
Creamy Coleslaw
Sweet Corn Souffle
Summer Squash Casserole
Steamed Green Beans
Buttermilk Biscuits and Corn Muffins
Pecan Pie and Peach Tart

A cash bar will be available.

Checks for $25 per person attending should be made out to "Flower Fund" and mailed by February 22 to
 

SEAM XVII
Department of Mathematics
University of Georgia
Athens, GA   30602-7403

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Support

All participants should plan to pay their own expenses including motel fees and the cost of the banquet. Applications for partial reimbursement will be distributed at the conference; if you prefer, you may print out a copy of the form in advance and hand it in at the conference.  Checks will be mailed out shortly after the conference ends.

We will reimburse expenses to the extent that our funds allow. There will be priorities, such as graduate students, participants who give short lectures, and participants without other means of support. In many cases, we hope to make major contributions toward local expenses including motel. Probably we will not be able to give much or anything to reimburse travel costs.

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Local information

Here are some useful links: UGA Math Department, information about Athens, The Red and Black (UGA student newspaper), Flagpole (Athens alternative newspaper).

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Sponsors

Funding for this year's SouthEastern Analysis Meeting is provided by Return to contents.


Accomodations

We have reserved 50 rooms at the Holiday Inn, 197 East Broad St., Athens.  The rate is $81 per night.   Participants should book the rooms themselves - the telephone number is 706-549-4433, Ext 6880. Rooms need to be booked by February 8, because the hotel will not hold them after that. Mention that you are a conference participant in order to get the quoted rate.

For the budget-minded, there is also the Holiday Inn Express, 513 West Broad St., Athens. This is a slightly reduced service hotel, at which rooms currently go for $69 per night. The above phone number can also be used to book rooms at this hotel.

Finally, there is the Downtowner Motel, where singles currently go for a  $42/night, doubles for  $50/night.  To quote from a recent UGA conference announcement: " 'Good enough for us', as several generations of topologists will readily testify". Call 706-549-2626 for reservations.

The two versions of  the Holiday Inn are essentially downtown, within a block of each other.  The Downtowner is in the "Five points" neighborhood, which  (somewhat pardoxically) is not downtown at all.  All three hotels are about a 20-25 minute walk from the Graduate Studies Building, where the talks will be held.

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Registration

There is no registration fee for the conference.   However, to help in our planning, we would like to have the following information as soon as possible, but no later than February 1.  Either return the online form, or include the following information in an e-mail message to    seam17@math.uga.edu:

Contact Information:
        Name, e-mail address, and phone
        Affiliation and mailing address

Participation:
        Probability of attending conference
        Whether you wish to give a 20-minute talk* .
        Whether you plan to attend the banquet Friday evening; whether you are bringing any guests
        Whether you plan to attend the barbeque Saturday evening; whether you are bringing any guests
        Whether you plan to request support from  SEAM

Logistics and Requests (can be sent in later):
         Arrival Mode:  Plane to Athens, Plane to Atlanta, Car, or Other
         Date and approximate time of arrival
         Where you will be staying
         Date and approximate time of departure
         Special requests

 *  If you are giving a talk, we would like a (plain text or TeX) title and abstract.
    A  Mathematics Subject Classification Number  would also be helpful.
    This information is being posted on the conference website as it is received.

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Deadlines

February 1 Registration
February 8 Guaranteed room availability at Holiday Inn
February 15 Titles for 20-minute talks
February 22 Checks covering banquet made out to "Flower Fund" 

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Travel

1) All major airlines have flights into Atlanta. The van service AAA Athens/Atlanta Airport Express (800-354-7874) can provide the 90 minute trip to Athens for $30 one way. You'll need to contact AAA to make a reservation. Please consult the AAA schedule.

2) The only airline that has flights into Athens is US Airways (800-428-4322), which flies to Athens from Charlotte. There are three flights a day from Charlotte to Athens, and there are many flights to Charlotte from the Northeast. The Athens airport is just a couple of miles from town, and there is taxi service from the airport. (Someone from the math department may be able to pick you up at the Athens airport.)

3) One can often find great airline deals to/from Atlanta on Clark Howard's site: check out the Clark Howard site for more details.

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Original Announcement

Dates March 2-3, 2001
Location The University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia
Main Speakers
John McCarthy  (Washington University in St. Louis) 
     First Lecture: Pick's theorem - What's the Big Deal?
     Second Lecture: Generalizations of Pick's Theorem

Guoliang Yu  (Vanderbilt University) 
     First Lecture: Large Scale Geometry of Groups
     Second Lecture: Novikov's Conjecture
Conference e-mail Address seam17@math.uga.edu
Organizing Committee
Ed Azoff azoff@math.uga.edu
Kevin Clancey kclancey@math.uga.edu
Elliot Gootman gootman@math.uga.edu
Jim Solazzo solazzo@math.uga.edu
Jingzhi Tie jtie@math.uga.edu
Shuzhou Wang szwang@math.uga.edu
Rongwei Yang ryang@math.uga.edu

Each main speaker will give two hour-long presentations.  These are designed to be accessible to graduate students.  Abstracts  can be found below.

Parallel sessions will be scheduled for 20-minute talks.

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Abstracts of Main Lectures


John McCarthy's First Lecture: Pick's theorem - What's the Big Deal ?

Abstract:  Suppose N points in the unit disk, z1, ... ,zN are given, along with N complex numbers w1, ... , wN .  In 1916, Georg Pick considered the question of when one could find a function  f  holomorphic in the unit disk and with positive real part that interpolated the data, i.e. satisfied  f(zi) = w for every i.

Pick completely answered the question, and his criterion --- that the matrix whose ij'th entry is
(wi + bar(wj)) / (1 - zi bar(zj)) be positive semi-definite --- can be proved using fairly basic function theory.

Yet operator theorists still write hundreds of papers a year about this problem - why?  The purpose of this expository talk is to explain why Pick's problem is important to engineers, and how it is related to operator theory.


John McCarthy's Second Lecture:  Generalizations of Pick's Theorem

Abstract:  We shall discuss some extensions of Pick's theorem to other settings.


Guoliang Yu's First Lecture:  Large Scale Geometry of Groups

Abstract:  Large scale geometry was first introduced by Mostow in the proof of his famous rigidity theorem. It is popularized by Gromov's work on geometric group theory. In this talk, I will explain the basic ideas of large scale geometry. In particular, I will discuss Gromov'sconcept of uniform embedding into Hilbert space.


Guoliang Yu's Second Lecture:  Novikov's Conjecture

Abstract:  A fundamental problem in the topology of high-dimensional manifolds is the Novikov conjecture. Roughly speaking the Novikov conjecture states that manifolds are rigid at a certain infinitesimal level. In my second talk, I will explain what is the Novikov conjecture, why it is interesting, and how it is related to large scale geometry of groups via K-theory of C*-algebras.

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