Institute for Mathematical Sciences

Topics at the Interface of Low Dimensional Group Actions and Geometric Structures

(4 - 15 Jan 2021)


You have to be registered on LumiNUS to access all activities and lectures. Please register following the instructions of your acceptance email that you should have received after registering. Once you have registered and logged onto LumiNUS, choose “non-academic modules” to find the program. From there, you can access Gather.town, the zoom links, the lecture recordings, and the problem sheets.


General Enquiries: ims(AT)nus.edu.sg
Scientific Aspects Enquiries: matzt(AT)nus.edu.sg

Geometric group theory, in the broadest sense, seeks to understand the structure of groups through their actions on objects with geometric meaning. Conversely, one can take a known group and attempt to understand all its geometrically meaningful actions. One natural notion that arises in this setting is an Anosov representation, which came about as an attempt to describe what it means for the action of a discrete group on a homogeneous space to be geometrically well behaved. Also, in his Erlangen program, Felix Klein viewed geometry as a space which is invariant under a group of transformations. This gave rise to the notion of a geometric structure, which gives yet another notion of a geometrically meaningful action of a group on a homogeneous space.

In this two-week program, we explore the interactions between geometric group theory, geometric structures and Anosov representations. An introductory school aimed at graduate students and young researchers will be conducted in the first week from 4 - 8 January. In the second week, from 11 - 15 January, there will be a workshop on the same topics. Both the introductory school and the workshop will be held online.


  • Organizational outline of the workshop
    For both the introductory school and the workshop, all talks will be pre-recorded and made available to registered participants in advance. Registered participants can watch these recordings at their own time.

    Aside from the recordings, there will be daily organized activities for both the introductory school and the workshop. The schedule for the organized activities will depend on the geographical location of the participant. More precisely, the participants of the introductory school and workshop will be divided into three regions:
    1. Asia (and Australia),
    2. Europe,
    3. US.
    All organized activities will involve two of the three regions at the following times:
    1. Asia and US, GMT: 3:00 – 5:00,
    2. Asia and Europe, GMT 11:00 – 13:00,
    3. Europe and US, GMT 19:00 – 21:00.

  • Introductory School: 4 - 8 January 2021
    PDF Abstracts
    All talks will be pre-recorded and made available to registered participants before the start of the introductory school.
    Organized activities will consist of
    1. unmoderated problem sessions (with exercise sheets provided by the mini-course speakers), and
    2. moderated Q&A sessions with the minicourse speakers at the end of the week.
    See schedule for more details. The problem sessions on Monday – Thursday will be conducted via GatherTown. The moderated Q&A session on Friday will be conducted via zoom.
  • Speakers:
    • Francesco Bonsante, Università degli Studi di Pavia, Italy
    • Tullia Dymarz, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA
    • François Guéritaud, Université de Strasbourg, France
    • Yair Minsky, Yale University, USA

  • Workshop: 11 - 15 January 2021
    PDF Abstracts
    All talks will be pre-recorded and made available to registered participants before the start of the workshop. Organized activities will consist of moderated Q&A sessions with the speakers. These sessions will be conducted via zoom.
  • See schedule for more details. Please note that schedule is tentative, and please visit webpage for updates.
    Speakers:
    • Carolyn Abbott, Columbia University, USA
    • Richard Canary, University of Michigan, USA
    • Jeffrey Danciger, University of Texas at Austin, USA
    • Pallavi Dani, Louisiana State University, USA
    • Martin Deraux, Université Grenoble Alpes, France
    • Valentina Disarlo, Heidelberg University, Germany (Masterclass speaker)
    • Subhojoy Gupta, Indian Institute of Science, India
    • Eiko Kin, Osaka University, Japan
    • Yusuke Kuno, Tsuda University, Japan
    • Gye-Seon Lee, Sungkyunkwan University, Korea
    • Seonhee Lim, Seoul National University, Korea
    • Yash Lodha, EPFL, Switzerland
    • Mahan Mj, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, India
    • Ken’ichi Oshika, Gakushuin University, Japan
    • Riddhi Shah, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
    • Ser Peow Tan, National University of Singapore, Singapore
    • Nicolas Tholozan, CNRS, École normale supérieure de Lyon, France
    • Alexander Thomas, IRMA, Université de Strasbourg, France (Masterclass speaker)
    • Stephan Tillmann, The University of Sydney, Australia
    • Andrew Zimmer, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

  • Social activities
    Online coffee breaks and other exciting social events. Stay tuned!

  • Registration Closed.


Group photo will be uploaded at a later date.