University of Warwick
Geometry & Topology Symposium
Workshop, July 1st to 12th 2002

The workshop will start with a two-day joint meeting with the London-Sussex-Southampton Biennial Topology Seminar (Monday 1st and Tuesday 2nd)
Thursday and Friday till tea (4th and 5th) are devoted to a joint 60th birthday fest for Roger Fenn, Dale Rolfsen and Colin Rourke (organiser Brian Sanderson), with a buffet in the Mathematics Institute, Thursday evening.

Programme: week 1

All talks will take place in the Mathematics Institute Seminar Room 2.

Monday 1st July, London-Sussex-Southampton Topology Seminar -- Day 1
Monday morning: registration (MRC office, Mathematics Institute)
2.00 Slava Krushkal "4-manifolds, trees and amenable groups"
3.00 Tea
4.00 Martin Dunwoody "Methods for proving the Poincare Conjecture"

Tuesday 2nd July, London-Sussex-Southampton Topology Seminar -- Day 2
10.00 Mustafa Korkmaz "A construction of Lefschetz fibrations with prescribed fundamental group."
11.00 Coffee
11.30 Cameron Gordon "Surface Subgroups of Coxeter Groups"
12.30 Lunch
2.00 Andreas Zastrow "Higher singular homology groups of subsets of surfaces do not behave anomalously"
3.00 Tea
4.00 Stavros Garoufalidis "On knots with trivial Alexander polynomial"

Wednesday 3rd July
9.30 James Hughes "Link homotopy invariant racks"
10.30 Coffee
11.00 Iain Aitchison "Canonical deformations of spaces of constant curvature"
12.15 Jerry Levine "Casson-Gordon invariants and metabelian \rho invariants of knots"
Wednesday afternoon free

Thursday 4th July, Triple birthday fest for Roger Fenn, Dale Rolfsen and Colin Rourke -- Day 1

Click for full resolution image.

9.30 Rob Kirby "Revolution"
10.30 Coffee
11.00 David Epstein "On the logarithmic spiral"
12.30 Lunch
2.00 Brian Sanderson "Classifying classical links and calculations"
3.00 Tea
4.00-4.30 Andrew Fish "Making the Jones polynomial invariant under tangle substitutions"
4.30-5.00 Catherine Webster "Braids and cryptography"
5.00-5.30 Ebru Keyman "The singular braid monoid embeds in a group"
6.00 Drinks in the common room followed by:
Buffet, bubbly, birthday cake, music, dancing, NO SPEECHES

Friday 5th July, Triple birthday fest -- Day 2 (till tea)
9.30 Roger Fenn "Not another knot polynomial (yawn)"
10.30 Coffee
11.00 Dale Rolfsen "A personal obsession"
12.30 Lunch
2.00 Colin Rourke "Why the Poincare conjecture is so hard"
3.00 Tea: Triple birthday fest ends
4.00 Luis Paris "Magnus type representations of braid groups"

Week 2

Two day meeting: Tuesday 9th July and Wednesday 10th July

Tuesday 9th July
9.45 Motoko Sakuma "Analogy of McShane's identity for 2-bridge knots and word problem for 2-bridge knot groups"
10.45 Coffee
11.15 Stavros Garoufalidis "The Casson invariant of cyclic branched covers"
2.00 Hugh Morton "Homfly skeins"
3.00 Tea
4.00 Daan Krammer "Braid groups are linear"

Wednesday 10th July
9.45 Justin Roberts "Rozanski-Witten invariants"
10.45 Coffee
11.15 Max Forester "On uniqueness of group decompositions"
2.00 Caroline Series "Quasi-Fuchsian groups with small bending OR Indra's pearls"
3.00 Tea
4.00 Adam Epstein "Mating of quadratic polynomials"

Please contact one of the organisers (below) if you are interested in coming. We have some (limited) funds to cover participants expenses. Please let us know your needs when contacting us.

The Organizers:
Roger Fenn,
Colin Rourke,
Brian Sanderson

For all enquiries about accomodation and registration please contact the MRC secretary:

Peta Mcallister
Mathematics Institute
University of Warwick
COVENTRY CV4 7AL, UK
Email: peta@maths.warwick.ac.uk,