Participant Testimonials
The workshop was a great success for me! I met two collaborators with whom I could work intensely. I also met other people I know and could discuss with them. I met young people I did not know which was also very interesting for me. Certainly the workshop was very inspiring for me! The talks and discussions gave me new ideas.
Department of Mathematics, Universitaet Bielefeld
I made new contacts with people I hadn't met before. Some of the talks were very inspiring for me, and in fact, I now have a new idea of a whole (rather big) project based on some of the talks and discussions I had afterwards. I also continued some of my ongoing research projects with people I hadn't seen in a while. And perhaps most interestingly, the environment is really inspiring too: on one of the nice afternoon hikes we had, we started talking about mathematical ideas, and it turned out that our research had connections we weren't aware of before.
Department of Mathematics, Ghent University
Thank you very much again for your hospitality during this workshop. We enjoyed a great scientific program which nevertheless left enough time for working on research projects with the colleagues. During this workshop Kay (Magaard) and I have been working on a sequel of our paper "Imprimitive irreducible modules for finite quasisimple groups". The objective is to complete the classification for quasisimple groups in characteristic 0. In our first paper we had to assume that the groups of Lie type arise from algebraic groups with connected centers. This assumption excludes certain quasisimple groups. I was also invited to give a talk on recently completed work with Husen and Magaard. Apart from the scientific actitivities, I enjoyed the inimitable location of BIRS, and in particular the delicious food offered. Thank you once again for inviting me.
I did already send details on my scientific interaction with other participants to the organizers of the conference. I got to know several young participants which might facilitate future hiring decision.
While at the workshop I was able to finish one joint paper (with other participants) and start on a new collaboration. The workshop also benefited me by drawing world-class algebraists to Alberta, some of whom agreed to extend their travels to visit me in Lethbridge. This has been a great boon to my research.
We had long chats with Zinovy Reichstein . His favourite area (the subject of his recent ICM talk) is essential dimension of various structures. It seems that I will be able to prove some new results about the asymptotic structure of finite groups(my favourite area) with given essential dimension. With James Wilson we discussed possible joint work elaborating a connection I found between permutation groups (the subject of the workshop) and p-groups (his favourite subject).
The workshop was excellent. I now have at least three new collaborative broad research projects to work on, possibly more.
Joy Morris, Pablo Spiga and I spent quite some time at BIRS working on the problem of proving that almost all Cayley graphs on generalised dicyclic groups are graphical regular representations. We made significant progress and it looks like we will submit a paper based on this research later this year. I also had some interesting discussions with László Pyber about related topics.
Participation in the BIRS workshop on Permutation Groups introduced me to ideas and new contacts that could benefit my research. Although at an early stage and there is nothing concrete to report at present, there is the possibility that papers and new collaborations could emerge from the meeting. My research in topological groups has links with permutation groups and algebraic groups, which were the main focus of the workshop, and two of the talks described ideas that might transfer to solve particular problems concerning topological groups. I will explore both these ideas in future work. Although broader and less specific, insights gained in other talks were also beneficial. I had useful discussions with several people. In some cases these consolidated links that had been initiated previously but in at least two other cases were new links that could lead to new collaborations. I met and heard talks by a number of younger mathematicians in fields related to mine, who I will keep in mind when advertising positions in future.
Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Newcastle Australia
The workshop was fantastic, and I am deeply indebted to the organizers and BIRS for making it so successful. Being quite young in my career, the opportunity to interact mathematically and socially with the other participants, being of all different levels, was great, and I will likely not realize all of the impact for many years. That said, here are some concrete anecdotes: 1) I spent a few hours discussing some aspects of Moufang sets with Tom De Medts and Yoav Segev. There are some configurations that have come up in my research on which I am hoping that they may have some insight. The problem did not get solved, but we shall see. 2) I spoke with Dennis Gulko about his research on linear sharply 2-transitive groups. I was especially excited that his approach made use of the notion of generic 2-transitivity, a topic on which I have been thinking and which was the subject of my talk at the workshop. He is interested in extending his work to linear sharply 3-transitive groups, and we talked a bit on how one might get started. 3) After speaking with Dennis about his work on linear permutation groups, it seemed to me that it would be quite interesting to investigate linear Moufang sets. I believe that the general theory might be able to be considerably sharpened when restricting to the linear case, and perhaps, in a way analogous to Gulko's work, one might be led to consider some generic version of a Moufang set. I mentioned these ideas to De Medts and Segev, and they agreed that these would be interesting to explore. 4) Following my talk, I received some comments from Bob Guralnick and Zinovy Reichstein on a problem I mentioned about degrees of generic transitivity of simple algebraic groups, and I plan to follow-up with them in the near future. Again, I am so happy to have been a part of such an enjoyable workshop. Many thanks to all those that made it possible.
