math news

The University of Iowa Department of Mathematics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences will host the 2007 Midwest Geometry Conference May 18-20 in Lecture Room 1 of Van Allen Hall on the UI campus.Featuring some 24 plenary speakers from Princeton University, Stanford University, MIT and other leading research universities in Asia, Australia, Europe, the United States and New Zealand, the confer-ence will be attended by more than 160 mathematicians from around the world. Also, younger research-ers will deliver parallel session presentations. The free, public conference opens at 8:15 a.m. May 18 with a short welcome, followed by the first plenary talk by Mike Eastwood, professor of mathematics at the University of Adelaide, Australia.The conference is being held in memory of the late Thomas P. Branson (1953-2006), who received his doctorate from MIT in 1979. He served as UI professor of mathematics from 1985-2006, and worked in a variety of fields including mathematical physics. Additional information about the conference can be found at the conference Web site: http://www.math.uiowa.edu/MGC2007/.