Participant Testimonials
Attending the BIRS workshop "Open Dynamical Systems: Ergodic Theory, Probabilistic Methods and Applications" was a perfect opportunity for me to reacquaint myself with a subject that I worked on some years ago, and I found the meeting very inspiring, informing me about many aspects of the subject that I can't tell I was thoroughly aware of (such as the developments in numerical computation of spectra of transfer operators and the applications to metastable systems). For renewing contacts and forging new ones, these workshops are ideal, and it helps me in my activities as referee, journal editor and mathematician in general.
It a very interesting workshop. I met with many people working on similar problems as myself. I learned about new problems and some new results. I have a chance to talk to people I would not probably meet otherwise. Three of my former PhD students also attended, so it was great to meet with them. And Banff is a wonderful place. I greatly enjoyed the walk on the Sulphur Mountain.
Department of Mathematics & Statistics, Concordia University
Many thanks also for the opportunity to stay and work at BIRS again. It is always a very enjoyable stay. As a matter of fact, the workshop initiated a collaboration with Kathrin Padberg-Gehle and Shane Ross and I am very excited about this. We are going to apply techniques on the detection of global bifurcations based on transfer operator techniques to fluid motion. We suspect that this might be a new way to, e.g., predict certain phenomena like vortex splitting and thus have interesting applications in weather forecasts.
The BIRS workshop 'Open Dynamical Systems: Ergodic Theory, Probabilistic Methods and Applications' offered the opportunity to become familiar with many recent results on topics in both abstract and applied ergodic theory. I think that without this opportunity it would have been very hard if not impossible to have gained a reasonable understanding of some of these latest results, which might influence my future research. Also, the workshop facilitated communication with the other participants. Although it is very hard to say a few days after the workshop, how many of the new ideas- my possible collaborators and I came up with during several conversations -will end up in publishable papers, I am very hopeful in this respect. Furthermore, some of these possible new collaborators, are researchers that I would have not been able to discuss at large with, otherwise. I am a postdoc and no, I do not think that the workshop influenced my job prospects. I think that the workshop made realize once more that there are many open questions in both abstract and applied ergodic theory that are worth exploring.
Very nice workshop, lots of good talks with interesting differences in background, bravo. Banff is a wonderful place.
