Participant Testimonials
Thank you for a great conference on geometric analysis and general relativity! I picked up at least one, maybe two, collaborators at the conference, which will be important for my research. My background is more theoretical, even though I am getting involved in simulations of spiral galaxies. Hence, collaborators with a background in numerics, as I have found at the conference, will be essential to my future progress. I was also able to communicate my new results on dark matter and spiral galaxies to some of the top people in the field, including Prof. Yau from Harvard, Prof. Schoen from Stanford, and Prof. Huisken from the Albert Einstein Institute in Germany. Their feedback and encouragement was wonderful. Also, they will be particularly invaluable as they help disseminate the results presented at the conference by all of the speakers to others around the world. The atmosphere was perfect, and I was very productive in terms of new ideas during the week as well. Time will tell how these ideas pan out. One of my recent Ph.D. graduates, Jeff Jauregui, attended. I can tell that he gained a lot from the experience and has a new perspective on the active areas of research in geometric analysis and general relativity. The organizers deserve a hearty congratulations on an outstanding job! They were successful at getting many of the top people in the world into the same room to exchange and collaborate on ideas. The program they developed was both intensive in terms of talks while also leaving a good amount of time for collaborations and conversations among small groups. Personally, I had so much mathematical fun that it is literally taking me days to recover - that was the maximum intensity that I can muster for one week. The conference was one of my favorites of all time. With three kids at home, I do not travel as much as I used to or would like, so I have become very selective about where I do visit. BIRS is one of the places I intend to go to again and again. Thank you!
The workshop was excellent, the talks of highest quality. I talked with Greg Galloway on a potentially very interesting project on a "Lohkamp-type approach" to the mass-momentum inequality, which we are planning to pursue in the near future. I and Lug Nguyen and Gustav Holzegel had several discussions about an ongoing project concerning the mass of axisymmetric black holes, with some new promising ideas which we plan to explore. Finally, I and Luc Nguyen stayed for another two days after the workshop to continue our collaboration on removable singularites of solutions of stationary Einstein equations. We wrote a first draft of a paper containing the result, which we plan to submit for publication within the next two weeks. We are very grateful to BIRS for the opportunity to work face-to-face on this project.
I have a new PhD student who will be starting on July 1st. His subject will be related to the stability of black strings. It was therefore of great interest to me that at the conference Frans Pretorius reported on his impressive new numerical results on this subject and showed animations which are not otherwise available at this time. What I learned there will definitely influence the project of my student and this talk was the highlight of the meeting for me. It might also interest you to see what I wrote about this on my blog (External link).
