Participant Testimonials
This workshop was closely connected to my recent research. (I and two of the organizers were the ones who found the connection between Whittaker functions and crystal graphs.) It was valuable to have a workshop which allowed me to meet people working on the crystal graphs side of the subject. I also enjoyed meeting Garland, and we hope to have some conversations this coming year as we are not too distant geographically. These could be very exciting, as a main problem is to find connections between multiple Dirichlet series (MDS) and automorphic objects, and Eisenstein series on loop groups are a strong possibility. And I enjoyed hearing from Diaconu of his latest, very surprising, research, which shows that the topic of endoscopy must enter into the study of even relatively simply MDS which have an infinite group of functional equations.
Department of Mathematics, Boston College
My expertise and main interests only partially overlap with the main subject of the conference. Thus the conference was rather beneficial to me: 1) I gained more insight in the subject. 2) It crystallized (to use that word) some possible future research directions. I liked that the organizers allowed various lengths talks: 30, 45 and 60 minutes.
This was a very stimulating workshop. It was in particular interesting to me since there were many mathematicians from different areas (like number theory, representation theory, physics). It was great to see that the crystal bases I have studied in a different context actually come up in number theory!
