The property of rapid decay

January 23 to January 27, 2006

at the

American Institute of Mathematics, Palo Alto, California

organized by

Indira Chatterji and Laurent Saloff-Coste

This workshop, sponsored by AIM and the NSF, will be devoted to the property of Rapid Decay.

The property of Rapid Decay (abbreviated by property RD) is a property of convolution operators that captures certain aspects of the asymptotic geometry of a finitely generated group. Property RD is a very focused area of research in harmonic analysis and operator algebra. However, it has ramifications in geometry, topology and algebra.

Valette's conjecture that all cocompact lattices in a semisimple Lie group have property RD is still open in many cases. Some cases are settled positively but, for the remaining ones, new ideas are needed. Discussions between people from operator algebras and non-commutative geometry and specialists in arithmetic groups, ergodic theory, random walks and geometric group theory will help gain a better insight on property RD.

Initial lectures will be devoted to the basics of property RD and stress its importance in various areas of mathematics. They will be accessible to people unfamiliar with property RD and its applications.

Specific topics to be addressed include:

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 working sessions.

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

For more information email workshops@aimath.org


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