Annual Report 2005 - Fields Institute - University of Toronto

Barbara Lee Keyfitz
AT THE END OF MY FIRST YEAR AS DIRECTOR, I am pleased
to present this Annual Report as a record of the varied
activities carried on at the Fields Institute or under its
sponsorship during the past year. Much of our activity is
many years in the planning, and much of what you will
read about in these pages has come to fruition as a result of
the dedicated and imaginative leadership of Ken Davidson,
Fields director from 2001 to 2004, who continues to be
involved as an advisor, and who deserves the thanks of the
whole community.
The key word for our activities this year has been “interdisciplinary”,
as we have reached out in our thematic
program on The Geometry of String Theory to embrace both
mathematical and physical aspects of this topical area. The
organizing committee consisted of three mathematicians,
Lisa Jeffrey, Mikhail Kapranov and Boris Khesin, and
three physicists, Kentaro Hori, Robert Myers and Amanda
Peet. And let me hasten to add that even that disciplinary
breakdown is misleading, for Kentaro is a faculty member
in both mathematics and physics, while many of the participants
held degrees in one discipline and appointments
in the other.
Furthermore, we ran the program jointly with Perimeter
Institute, a physics institute, in Waterloo. The program
attracted a renowned international collection of visitors,
M e s s a g e f r o m t h e D i r e c t o r
including Clay Senior Scholar Eric Zaslow of Northwestern
University, and an outstanding set of postdoctoral fellows
who, as always, contributed greatly to the life of the
institute. Fields medalist Edward Witten, claimed by both
the mathematics and the physics communities, gave the
Distinguished Lecture Series, while we had three stimulating
Coxeter lecturers this year: Nigel Hitchin, Robbert
Dijkgraaf and Renata Kallosh. (These speakers also represent
both mathematics and physics.)
The one or two thematic programs at Fields each year
are the single most important events we run, the reason
for our existence and the greatest source of pride for the
administration and for the staff. A year-long thematic
program involves about six workshops, each one attracting
thirty to fifty new participants in addition to the scholars
in residence, and often, as this year, the program runs a
summer school also. Visitors arrive here from twenty or
thirty countries: principally the United States, Great Britain,
France, Germany, Russia and Japan but also this year
the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, countries of Eastern
Europe, Israel, Mexico, and countries of South America
and of the Pacific Rim. Frequently, as is again the case this
year, the Institute’s program is also a backdrop for a major
national or international conference; this year it is “Strings
05”, which met in Toronto in July and is the premier international
conference in string theory. As well as the dozen
Fields Institute 2005 ANNUAL REPORT 6