NSF Award
1740888
The Between Geometry and Relativity summer school (July 17-21, 2017) and conference (July 24-28, 2017) will be held at the Erwin Schrödinger Institute (ESI) in Vienna, Austria, as two major focus events of the Geometry and Relativity program (July 17-September 8, 2017). The program will bring together doctoral students, promising young researchers, and leading experts to discuss spectacular recent developments in the nexus of geometric analysis and general relativity, to assess new avenues for investigations, to support existing collaborations, and to promote new ones. In recent years, gravitational wave experiments such as that of LIGO have seen striking advances, confirming phenomena anticipated by general relativity (Einstein's theory of gravitation). These developments have led to a new surge of activity in the study of cosmological models, black holes, and other areas in the field. The summer school is designed to introduce aspects of the field to graduate students and other junior investigators, and at the conference participants will learn about a range of current research questions. The ESI program affords young researchers the opportunity to enhance the development of their research program through interaction with established and emerging leaders in the field. This grant will provide support for graduate students and other junior investigators from the U.S. interested in attending the conference and/or summer school, and who would otherwise be unable to do so without this support. <br/><br/>The study of the Einstein equations as a model for gravitational phenomena involves deep and fundamental relationships between geometric analysis and physics. Spectacular progress has been made in recent years on several fronts, including the study of wave equations on black hole space-times (with the eventual goal of understanding black hole stability), cosmic censorship, dynamical formation of black holes in vacuum, topology of black holes, and a better understanding of the moduli space of solutions to the Einstein constraint equations that govern geometry of initial data for the Cauchy problem. Recent advances in numerical analysis of gravitational phenomena highlight the need to push the theoretical boundaries of the initial value formulation (both in constructing solutions to the constraints and in understanding the evolution of these initial data sets) and to create a bridge between the researchers in these areas. The purpose of the summer school and conference is to introduce graduate students and other junior investigators to the tools needed to approach such results and to frame some outstanding open problems in the field. Details of the program are available at the program webpage: http://www.esi.ac.at/activities/events/2017/between-geometry-and-relativity
