Participant Testimonials
The meeting in honour of Robert Moody's upcoming 70th birthday and his contribution to the field of Aperiodic Order was not only very successful, it also came at the right time: it predated the Nobel Price to Danny Shechtman in Chemistry for the discovery of quasicrystals by a few days !! The mathematical activities in the field of Aperiodic Order were triggered by Shechtman's discovery, and the meeting showed how stimulating this has been over the past years. The interaction between the participants was outstanding, and showed the advantage of a relatively young field -- lots of things still to discover. Also, the possibility to stay one day longer was used by a number of people, and proved to be very productive -- sometimes one extra day can help a lot !!
Faculty of Mathematics, University of Bielefeld
The week has been absolutely fantastic - we had lots of excellent talks and many useful informal discussions. Thank you in particular for allowing me to stay for an additional night - the extra day proved very fruitful, as, on a collaborative project with two of the other participants, we managed to understand and solve a problem on Saturday morning which we had been stuck with for a while. I am sure that this will eventually lead to a joint publication which would presumably not have been produced (or at least not until much later) without the workshop and the stimulating atmosphere at BIRS.
The workshop was a very good opportunity for me to meet the world-wide experts in the field to discuss the scientific problems related to aperiodic order. I learned a lot from the comments concerning my presentation at the workshop. It was also inspiring to see the state of the art of research in the different aspects of almost periodic order. I had a number of discussions, which gave me new insight into my own ongoing research. I also continued an ongoing collaboration during the workshop -- direct discussion is much more effective than exchange of notes. It was also interesting learn about a non-intersecting lattice path problem -- this was not in the focus of the workshop, but worthwile for me, since a student of mine has currently worked on a similar problem and might be interested in contacting the speaker.
Department of Mathematics, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
The meeting was of direct help for my research, in three ways: 1) I got a lot of helpful feedback on the project I'm working on, and on the preliminary results that I gave a talk about. 2) I got to spend time with my collaborator Natalie Frank to plan our next steps, and 3) I learned about other problems out there. In particular, a comment that Jacek Miekicz (sp?) made in his talk let to a bunch of discussions between Jean-Marc Gambaudo and me that will probably result in a paper on the stability of quasicrystals. That's not even counting the indirect help that a conference like this can give. Your brain just works faster, and better, when in the company of the world experts in the field. I left with a much better understanding of the whole field, and not just my corner of it, than I came in with.
