The many facets of the Maslov index

April 7 to April 11, 2014

at the

American Institute of Mathematics, Palo Alto, California

organized by

Yasha Eliashberg, Etienne Ghys, and Andrew Ranicki

This workshop, sponsored by AIM and the NSF, 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:

  • Symplectic topology

  • Algebra

  • Dynamical systems

  • Bounded cohomology

  • Mathematical physics

The workshop will differ from typical conferences in some regards. Participants will be invited to suggest open problems and questions before the workshop begins, and these will be posted on the workshop website. These include specific problems on which there is hope of making some progress during the workshop, as well as more ambitious problems which may influence the future activity of the field. Lectures at the workshop will be focused on familiarizing the participants with the background material leading up to specific problems, and the schedule will include discussion and parallel working sessions.

The deadline to apply for support to participate in this workshop has passed.

For more information email workshops@aimath.org


Plain text announcement or brief announcement.