Workshop Announcement:

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          Braid Groups, Clusters and Free Probability
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                January 10 to January 14, 2005

  American Institute of Mathematics Research Conference Center

                     Palo Alto, California

        http://aimath.org/ARCC/workshops/braidgroups.html


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Description:
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This workshop, sponsored by AIM and the NSF, will be devoted to
deciphering the mysterious connections between the following objects:

-  Garside monoid structures for Coxeter and braid groups,
   and the associated "lattices of non-crossing partitions"
   which (in the types A and B) also govern the "R-transforms" 
   of free probability

-  the cluster algebras of Fomin and Zelevinsky, and the
   associated polytopes known as "generalized associahedra"

-  ad-nilpotent ideals within Borel subalgebras of
   semisimple Lie algebras, or equivalently, subsets of
   pairwise incomparable positive roots 

The workshop is organized by
Jon McCammond, Alexandru Nica, and Victor Reiner.

For more details please see the workshop announcement page:
http://aimath.org/ARCC/workshops/braidgroups.html

Space and funding is available for a few more participants.
If you would like to participate, please apply by filling
out the on-line form (available at the link above) no later
than October 15, 2004. Applications are open to all, and
we especially encourage women, underrepresented minorities,
junior mathematicians, and researchers from primarily
undergraduate institutions to apply.

Before submitting an application, please read the ARCC
policies concerning participation and financial support
for participants.

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AIM Research Conference Center (ARCC):
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The AIM Research Conference Center (ARCC) hosts focused
workshops in all areas of the mathematical sciences. ARCC
focused workshops are distinguished by their emphasis on
a specific mathematical goal, such as making progress on a
significant unsolved problem, understanding the proof of an
important new result, or investigating the convergence between
two distinct areas of mathematics.

For more information about ARCC, please visit
http://www.aimath.org/ARCC/