The many facets of the Maslov index

April 7 to April 11, 2014

at the

American Institute of Mathematics, San Jose, California

organized by

Yasha Eliashberg, Etienne Ghys, and Andrew Ranicki

Original Announcement

This workshop will be devoted to the Maslov index, a collective name for many related invariants counting the jumps of functions, starting in the 19th century with the principal value of the complex logarithm. In its modern guise, the index was introduced by Keller in 1958 and independently rediscovered by Maslov in 1965 in the context of quantization, and then in the context of symplectic geometry by Arnold. The concept has spread widely in many branches of mathematics in different disguises. A collection of background readings may be found on http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~aar/maslov. The meeting will bring together workers in different areas which use the Maslov index, even if they do not recognize it as a single concept.

The main topics for the workshop are the applications of the Maslov index in:

Material from the workshop

A list of participants.

The workshop schedule.

A report on the workshop activities.

Papers arising from the workshop:

Signatures in algebra, topology, and dynamics
by  Étienne Ghys and Andrew Ranicki,  Six papers on signatures, braids and Seifert surfaces, 1–173, Ensaios Mat., 30, Soc. Brasil. Mat., Rio de Janeiro, 2016  MR3617347
Making cobordisms symplectic
by  Yakov Eliashberg, Emmy Murphy
Signatures in algebra, topology and dynamics
by  Etienne Ghys and Andrew Ranicki