Event at Calvin to Focus on Rarefied Topics

June 21, 2007 == MEDIA ADVISORY

Full story see http://www.calvin.edu/news/releases/2006-07/geometric-topology.htm

An upcoming workshop at Calvin College will take on some rarefied topics.

The 24th annual Workshop in Geometric Topology will be held at Calvin on June 28-30 and is being organized by Calvin's Gerard Venema with the help of colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Oregon State, Colorado College and Brigham Young University. It is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation and by the Calvin College Department of Mathematics and Statistics.

And while it might be a foreign language for many, Venema says the discipline of geometric topology has seen an explosion of new applications the past few years, including the use of geometric topology in molecular biology and polymer chemistry.

"Small structures at the level of molecules turn out to be twisted and knotted in ways that were never imagined in the past," he says, "and geometric topology is the tool that allows us to understand this kind of knotting and what effects it has on chemical and biological properties."

Geometric topology also is being applied these days to border security, adds Venema.

The annual Workshop in Geometric Topology, says Venema, brings in one speaker who gives a substantial introduction to an area of research. "We try to find speakers who are doing some of the most exciting and influential work in the field and have them talk about their latest results," he says.

The featured speaker for 2007 is Ian Agol of the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of California at Berkeley. He will give a series of one-hour talks on the topology of 3-manifolds. Additional seminars will be on such areas as the Singer conjecture for Coxeter groups, Fox re-embedding and Bing submanifolds and strategies for characterizing tame ends of manifolds.

Although the topics might seem esoteric, Venema notes that nearly one-third of this year's registered participants are students, including Calvin's Laura Feys who will go to Notre Dame in the fall for graduate school and last summer worked with Venema on an NSF-funded research project.

That partnering with students is not only a hallmark of the Workshop in Geometric Topology, but also a hallmark of the Calvin mathematics department, says Venema, who adds that doing mathematics at a Christian college is particularly meaningful for Calvin professors and their students.

"The discipline of mathematics is unique," he says, "in that it is both one of the liberal arts and one of the sciences. God has created us with an ability to recognize, understand, and appreciate certain kinds of abstract patterns. Most mathematicians, geometric topologists, in particular, are motivated by a desire to understand and explore mathematical relationships. For them the study of mathematics is part of our cultural mandate to explore and understand the world in which we live."

Contact Venema at 616-526-6908

-end-
Received on Thu Jun 21 09:20:42 2007