Mini course by Professor Paolo Bellingeri Université de Caen Surface braid groups are a natural generalization of classical braid groups and of fundamental groups of surfaces. They were first defined by Zariski during the 1930's (although braid groups on the sphere had been considered much earlier by Hurwitz), and they were re-discovered during the 1960's in the study of mapping class groups and configuration spaces. These groups, introduced as an "algebraic" tool, turned out to be very difficult to understand.…

The objective of the Data Visualization Competition is to highlight the community-wide benefits of open data, including identifying potential improvements to government services and procedures, and recognizing potential business opportunities. The event is designed to help educate and communicate the benefits and growth opportunities from visualization your data. All levels of government, academia and industry have large amounts of data available to the public through open data portals and this event promotes the use of this resource. Competitors will analyze,…

Combinatorics Algebra meets Algebraic Combinatorics" (CAAC) is a series of annual workshops that has been meeting since 2004. The main achievement of these meetings is the establishment of an ongoing dialogue between two separate research groups who had previously been using di erent techniques to study similar mathematical problems. The two groups are algebraic combinatorialists working on the representation theory of symmetric groups, and commutative algebraists studying minimal free resolutions and inverse systems. Since the initial meeting, the focus of…