3. Postdoctoral Program - MSRI

the audience would know a little about them. Senior members of the audience asked questions
and made comments to encourage the others. This seemed to work well. Also the attempt to
facilitate communication between the equivariant group and the symplectic topologists seemed
to work. One participant mentioned later in the program how useful the Connections had
been. She said that at a large conference one tends to talk to people one knows, and this gave
her a chance to get to know several people. Another participant mentioned how illuminating
the panel discussion had been; she realized that problems/concerns she had thought hers alone
were shared by many others. A third one (who had earlier expressed some scepticism about
events just for women) said that she had met someone at the dinner whom she would not
otherwise have talked to and that was valuable.
3. Introductory Workshop: Symplectic and Contact Geometry and Topology August 17, 2009
to August 21, 2009 Organized By: John Etnyre (Georgia Tech), Dusa McDuff (Barnard), and
Lisa Traynor (Bryn Mawr). The main goals of the workshop were to introduce people working
in some sub-discipline of the field or in a completely different area to a broad swath of the
field and frame the most important problems and subareas to give some shape to the year long
program. While not able to cover this immense field completely we focused on four broad areas
that will be the basis for most of the activities during the coming year. Specifically we focused
on (1) Symplectic field theory, (2) Floer homology, (3) Topological aspects, and (4) Applications.
For each topic we had a blend of mini-courses introducing the main ideas of the area and a few
other talks aimed more at exposing the lay of the land and future directions for the field, than
at one specific research result. In addition we had two very introductory lectures introducing
the history and basic ideas in symplectic and contact geometry and topology. Generous breaks
between the lectures was also an integral part of the workshop as it allowed the participants
time to interact with the speakers and amongst themselves.
Several people commented to the organizers that some of the talks in areas they knew less
well helped clarify a new aspect of the field for them. We also heard comments from some
of the graduate students who had attended the earlier Graduate Workshop that they had
understood most of the talks in the Introductory workshop and felt they had a good overview
of the field. Repeated comments of this sort, and the attendance of many of the talks by
MSRI members not associated with the symplectic and contact program, allow us to conclude
that the workshop certainly met its first stated goal above. There is also every indication that
the second goal was achieved as well, given that the organizers carefully consulted with the
organizing committee for the year long program.
4. Algebraic Structures in the Theory of Holomorphic Curves November 16, 2009 to November
20, 2009 Organized By: Mohammed Abouzaid (Clay), Yakov Eliashberg (Stanford), Kenji
Fukaya (Kyoto), Eleny Ionel (Stanford), Lenny Ng (Duke), Paul Seidel (MIT).
This workshop was run in conjunction with another one at AIM (Palo Alto) the week before.
The idea, which proved very successful, was to first assemble key specialists for informal
discussion (at AIM), and then to put the issues and results of that discussion in a wider perspective
(at MSRI). This wider context included: Symplectic Field Theory (talks of Ekholm,
Cieliebak, Bourgeois, and others); integrable systems theory (Rossi, Dubrovin, Givental, Liu);
mirror symmetry (Fukaya, Smith); the formalism of general Cohomological Field Theories
(Teleman, Woodward, Galatius). Bringing together these multiple viewpoints has stimulated
further progress since then, for instance Fabert’s collaboration with Rossi on integrable system
aspects of Symplectic Field Theory.
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