Participant Testimonials
This was indeed an excellent conference/workshop, well organized, and highly stimulating and useful for me personally. I greatly benefitted from my interaction with many of the speakers and participants (both mathematicians and physicists). No doubt there will be an ongoing dialogue on E8 among many of us as a result of this conference. Wishing you all the best in your efforts to further important mathematical research activities at BIRS.
I learned a lot during the meeting in BIRS and met the world research leaders in the structure of exceptional Lie groups. This was a great workshop.
Last week's meeting was indeed an exciting experience. Apart from meeting the leading experts in the representation and structure theory of Lie groups, it provided a very stimulating atmosphere for discussions between mathematicians and physicists on recent developments concerning the "Great Unification" in the theory of elementary particles.
A big thank you to the organisers for an extremely stimulating workshop, and to BIRS for hosting it, and for encouraging such workshops which cross normal subject boundaries. The three main things I got out of the workshop were: 1. An understanding of why and how theoretical particle physicists are using Lie groups. This was my primary purpose in wanting to attend the workshop in the first place. 2. Meeting Tevian Dray and Corinne Manogue and discussing the different ways we are all using 3 by 3 matrices over octonions, and possible connections between them. This unexpected encounter threw up many interesting ideas which we expect to take further. 3. Working with Kay Magaard on a new algorithm for finding a split Cartan subalgebra in a finite Lie algebra. This algorithm not only has applications to computational study of structure of finite matrix groups in characteristic p, but can also be used to study (especially exceptional) Lie groups over non-algebraically closed fields of characteristic 0.
