NSF Award
1800333
This award provides funding for the Mid-Atlantic Seminar On Numbers (MASON) for three years. MASON is a nascent regional conference in number theory whose main goal is to promote and sustain communication and collaboration among number theorists from the Mid-Atlantic region (defined to include the states of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia, plus the District of Columbia). The Mid-Atlantic has a growing and diverse community of number theorists. The need for a regular meeting like MASON is especially acute among students (both graduate and advanced undergraduates) and researchers at the many comprehensive and primarily undergraduate institutions in the region. MASON conferences will bring members of these groups in contact with one another and with distinguished number theorists. Thus, the meetings will be an important venue for professional development and networking for Ph.D. candidates, junior mathematicians and faculty at primarily undergraduate institutions. Moreover, MASON meetings will provide opportunities for the recruitment of students into graduate programs and for contacts between academic and non-academic mathematicians with interests in number theory. The award will be used primarily to support the traveling expenses of students, postdocs, and faculty without institutional travel support to the next three MASON conferences: MASON II in April of 2018 at Towson University; MASON III in the spring of 2019 at James Madison University; and MASON IV in 2020 at Gettysburg College. <br/><br/>MASON meetings will feature plenary lectures by leading experts in number theory and parallel sessions of contributed talks by participants. Each MASON meeting will feature also a problem session. The scientific focus of the conference will be on the following areas within number theory: algebraic number theory, analytic number theory, arithmetic geometry, automorphic forms and L-functions, elementary and combinatorial number theory, modular forms, and the theory of partitions. The plenary lectures will introduce the audience to recent breakthroughs in these areas, which represent--in broad strokes--the spectrum of interests of researchers in the region. In the contributed talks, participants will have the opportunity to report on their own research and to learn from each other. MASON meetings will also be venues to forge future research collaborations, both among number theorists and between number theorists and research mathematicians in related mathematical fields. <br/><br/>More information about MASON can be found at the main MASON website: <br/>https://wp.towson.edu/akumchev/mason/.
