Participant Testimonials
The workshop was very interesting. It showed the most recent developments in this field of arithmetic groups. The subject has a long tradition, but new insights, questions and ideas, as well as young people came into the field and these made this workshop very successful. Let me mention in particular the work on expanders and on growth of representation dimensions leading to new Zeta functions. There were also mini courses on recent subjects, where one had a chance to not only see the results but also to get a feeling for the methods involved in how to approach the problems and how to obtain the results. Three of those come to my mind, one on the recent solution of an old problem, the so called rank theorem, one on pseudoreductive groups, which solves some hitherto technical problems around non-separability and positive characteristic and one on Kac-Moody groups, a field that gives for mathematics new and interesting examples of groups and also has applications in physics. I think this was a very successful workshop. It also gave young people the opportunity to present their work. It fine tuned my opinion about two of the participants. It also gave very young colleagues the chance to see the forefront of current research. The workshop also gave me the opportunity to meet colleagues I had known for a long time, intensify my scientific contacts with them, but also to get to know more closely younger people who are new to the field.
Indeed the workshop was useful and stimulating. I would also like to record here my appreciation of the excellent arrangements made by BIRS for the stay of the participants: that contributed no little for the success of the workshop.
