Participant Testimonials
My participation in the BIRS workshop clearly impacted my current research: it was an opportunity for me to meet with several people (e.g. K. Zainoulline) and discuss new ideas, some of which will be the subject of joint papers. Also, naturally, this major event in the field helps us all to keep up to date with the latest results.
The BIRS workshop is wonderful. It provides me a great opportunity to give a presentation. This is the firs time that I give a talk in a conference. Most importantly, the workshop is a good place to learn new ideas. Although many presentations are professional and difficult to be understood by me, I get a good first impression of many research topics.
The fact is that the goes much beyond the only scope of my research, it is even hard to express it properly in English. Even though I was told that BIRS is one of the most incredible places in the world to make mathematics, I have been still amazed. The natural background, the organization, the setting of this workshop was incredible, and it is clearly the conference where i both enjoyed the place the most and worked the most.
The great environment (research- and otherwise) helped me to focus on a particular problem related the the workshop themes and while still at BIRS I typed up some notes regarding that problem, thus also reviving a collaboration on that topic in the process.
Mathematics, TU Dortmund
I have very recently returned from the wonderfully inspiring and productive BIRS workshop on Lie algebras, torsors and cohomological invariants. I want to thank you most warmly for creating together with your outstanding staff including Wynne Fong, Brent Kearney, Brenda Williams and Caroline Green the extraordinary ideal conditions for collaborative research work and for facilitating up to date quick information about the new results, new developments and new hopes. In particular it was very impressing immediately after a lecture of a participant to receive an e.mail from my graduate student in London, Ontario who was very excited about this lecture and who asked me to recommend him further lectures from the workshop suitable for his current studies and research work. The ease of the use and the quality of recording is remarkable. The hospitality and help of your team in every respect was just great. The workshop itself was superbly organized by Stefan Gille, Nikita Karpenko, Arturo Pianzola, Vera Serganova and Kirill Zainoulline. The lectures were very inspiring and so were the many discussions during lectures breaks,hikes,dining and other relaxing times. Thanks to this conference I began a project with Detlev Hoffman on structure of inseparable extensions and Witt kernels and further possible projects may develop from discussions and subsequent mutual visits with Stefan Gille, Raman Parimala and Kirill Zainoulline. The informative very happy friendly and exciting atmosphere in the spectacular environment was the key to ultimate success of this workshop.
I had a great time at BIRS -- not only were there excellent talks, but there was also some time to continue my research with Arturo Pianzola. In fact, we achieved a breakthrough there for our current research project.
Among the subjects of this workshop, I was very interested in the part concerning torsors and cohomological invariants, as well as on motivic aspects and applications for quadratic forms and algebras with involutions. I was very happy to assist to the very nice talks we had and to learn more on this subjects. I had also a chance to have a lot of conversations with other participants, which gave me some interesting projects, I am currently working on, and I hope this will lead to some new results soon.
IRMA, Strasbourg
I consider the workshop to be a great success. The quantity and quality of young researches and speakers was exceptional. More than half of speakers were young researchers and graduate students. The enthusiasm of the participants was evidenced by the frequent discussions and many questions asked after each talk. I feel that the experience that participants gained during the workshop will prove to be very valuable in their research career and will undoubtedly have a positive impact on the research activity in the area. I think, the idea to bring together people from different areas (Lie algebras and Torsors) was very fruitful and has lead to several interesting collaborations already. I expect that these will grow into joint research projects and publications.
