Past Events

2019 WiSCon Workshop, July 22-26, 2019, ICERM, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

The Women in Symplectic and Contact Geometry and Topology workshop (WiSCon) is a Research Collaboration Conference for Women (RCCW) in the fields of contact and symplectic geometry/topology and related areas of low-dimensional topology. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers at various career stages in these mathematical areas to collaborate in groups on projects designed and led by leaders in the field.

The mathematical fields of symplectic and contact geometry/topology, rooted in concepts from classical physics, have experienced huge growth in the past few decades. This growth has come in many forms, including multiple flavors of homology theories, symplectic embedding problems, techniques for regularizing spaces of pseudoholomorphic curves, and examples of mirror symmetry, to name a few. This workshop aims to generate research collaborations which build on the growing momentum in these topics, while fostering a network for the traditionally underrepresented groups of women and nonbinary mathematicians. Successful applicants will be assigned to a research project based on their expertise. Participants in this workshop will form groups of 4-6 members, each led by 2 research leaders, and tackle open problems in a variety of such topics as described in the group descriptions below, perhaps incorporating computational techniques using ICERM’s exceptional computing resources.

With these biannual special sessions, early career researchers in the job market and graduating gender minority and women Ph.D. candidates were given the opportunity to establish both collaborative and mentoring relationships with other mathematicians in symplectic and contact geometry and topology. The organizers of each year recruit new organizers for the following installments of these sessions.