Participant Testimonials
My participation helped me to strengthen my knowledge on current ongoing research especially in my field which is Functional Analysis, Geometry and Probability, and of course, present a talk on new very recent joint results I had with colleagues. My job is secure and so Birs had no effect on job prospects. The workshop was important and interesting and it will take to digest its significance on my research. I was encouraged to see that my current joint research is interesting to other mathematicians in the workshop.
Department of Mathematics, Technion
The program at BIRS was definitely first rate. The organizers did a wonderful job and the list of speakers was truly impressive. The interaction between convex geometry and harmonic analysis was very interesting, but this brings me to a related point. While I enjoyed the program greatly, looking at the list of programs I was struck by the nearly complete absence of activity in classical harmonic analysis and related fields like additive combinatorics and geometric measure theory. With Izabella Laba, Akos Magyar and Malabika Pramanik at UBC, and Eric Sawyer in McMaster, among others, it should be possible to organize an excellent program in Banff with focus on modern trends in harmonic analysis. While the PDE end of harmonic analysis has been thoroughly represented at Banff, other areas of harmonic analysis have not been featured nearly to the same extent and I believe that it would be very time to do something about that.
The meeting in Banff was great : good organization, good staff, good mathematics, and certainly very useful, at least for me, and certainly also for most others.
The stay at BIRS was a perfect opportunity to keep the contact to the other experts in my research field. We started discussing a new research project which looks rather promising. The contact to some people from Case Western University helped me to find the appropriate place for my PhD student for a stay in the USA.
The participation in the workshop "Harmonic analysis in convex geometry" enabled the continuation of two research projects with Matthias Reitzner (Univ. Osnabrueck) and Paul Goodey (Univ. Oklahoma). We made substantiall progress towards completing at least one new paper during the time in Banff. Also two of my graduate students (Thomas Wannerer, Manuel Weberndorfer) had the opportunity to participate in the workshop which has lead to new collaborations with Wolfgang Weil (Karlruhe Institute of Technology) and Rolf Schneider (Univ. Freiburg). This will undoubtedly have a positive affect on their future job prospects after they finished their PhD.
Institute of Discrete Mathematics and Geometry, Vienna University of Technology
There were several directions of research which I was less familiar with and the workshop provided the means to understand the technicalities of these sub-areas. I also had the opportunity to start a new research project. Its basic idea originated prior to the workshop, but it took off the ground while I was in Banff. Obviously, the atmosphere was very stimulating and conducive to research and I'm very grateful to BIRS for providing it. I also made new contacts in my field and became aware of the work and interests of several young people who are just starting out in their career.
As always when I am at BIRS everything was perfect and the scientific program was excellent. Thanks to my stay there, I was able to continue discussions on a project I have with 2 other colleagues that were also attending the workshop and we made quite some progress during the stay. Also, I did tentatively start two new projects with 2 other colleagues. The talks during the workshop were very interesting and gave me a lot of new ideas to think about. Alex, Artem, Dima and Vlad did a great job and so did everybody at BIRS!
This workshop allows me to learn recent contributions in convex geometry and its connection with other fields, such as quantum information theory, random matrices, etc. I also have opportunities to present my recent work on quantum information theory where we used a lot of techniques from convex geometry. Besides, I also have wonderful discussions with some great mathematicians and have chance to know some new mathematicians. This workshop definitely benefits me in my future research of convex geometry and its applications. I really appreciate your excellent work for organizing and holding such a wonderful workshop.
School of Mathematics and Statistics, Carleton University
