Groups St Andrews 2009 in Bath

Academic and Social Programme

Talk slides

To obtain copies of talk slides or notes (where available) go to the Proceedings and Talks section.

Timetable:

You may wish to view the Provisional Timetable, which includes details of social events as well as main talks and sessions.

There is also a Draft Timetable of Short Talks.

Programme:

The conference runs over two weeks, with a break on the middle weekend. The arrival days for the two weeks are Saturday 1 August and Sunday 9 August. There will be NO lectures on these arrival days. Similarly, Saturday 15 August is departure day with NO lectures.

Principal Speakers:

 
Gerhard Hiss (RWTH, Aachen, Germany) "Finite groups of Lie type and their representations"
Volodymyr Nekrashevych (Texas A&M, Texas, USA) "Iterated monodromy groups"
Dan Segal (All Souls College, Oxford) "Words and groups"
Eamonn O'Brien (Auckland, New Zealand) "Effective algorithmic approaches for linear groups"
Mark Sapir (Vanderbilt, Nashville, USA) "Residually finite groups, random walks and dynamics of polynomial maps over p-adics"

The speakers above have kindly agreed to give short courses of lectures in the first week of the conference.

Theme days:

In the second week of the conference there will be three theme days, an ‘Engel groups day’, a day to celebrate the birthdays of John Cannon and Derek Holt, and a ‘B.H. Neumann day’. See the timetable for details.

Plenary lectures and contributed talks:

In addition there will be a programme of one hour invited lectures and short research presentations.

Conference Banquets

The conference banquets will be held on the Tuesdays of each week. If you have specific dietary requirements, please send them to Gunnar Traustasson (gt223bath.ac.uk).

Conference Outings

There will be conference outings on the Wednesdays, for which the fees are included in full registration. Further details of those are on the website.

We also propose to offer two or three optional "pay as you go" outings, as follows.

  1. Horse Race Meeting in Bath. Thursday evening of Week 1. Cost 15 pounds including transport to and from the ground and entrance to the course.
  2. Day trip to London on the middle Sunday for sight seeing (Buckingham Palace, Parliament, Trafalgar Square etc). Includes 5 hours of free time to walk around London. Cost 15 pounds for transport to and from London.
  3. If there are no lectures on the middle Saturday, then there might also be a day trip to Cardiff, the capital of Wales, with lots of time to explore on foot. The cost would again be 15 pounds.

These three trips are subject to confirmation and will depend on sufficient interest. If you would like to go on any of these trips, please contact Gunnar to let him know. Outing fees are payable in cash at the conference.

Other Social Events

There will be opportunities for music making in the evenings. At the 1997 conference, barn dances were very popular. There will also be an opportunity for classical or popular music recitals. Please bring your instruments if you wish to make music.

We will have access to social space on campus in the evenings (music making and dancing encouraged). There will be a bar open until 11pm every evening. There is an associated skittles alley.