Participant Testimonials
The conference was on a subject I am very much familiar with. And yet, I learned an enormous amount from it! Somehow I was able to bring myself up-to-date with recent developments which I had not managed to internalize before. I learned about new results, about new connections between aspects of the theory that seemed disparate before, and about what others in the field have been pursuing. A direction that was only a potential collaboration before this meeting became a solid and roaring project through just two hours of discussions at the meeting. An old dormant project was revisited and possibly revived during the meeting. I exchanged idea with a good number of others, but it is premature to tell if there will be outcomes. A colleague expressed interest in seeing an application from a student of mine. I think this counts as affecting my student's job prospects!
Mathematics, Brown University
My first time in Banff, hopefully not my last. An extremely well organised conference, and conversations I had during the week will definitely have a positive impact on my research going forward.
BIRS provided an ideal environment for several very useful research conversations. The meeting brought together many people whose work I have been studying with interest recently. The informal setting with ample discussion time was ideal for getting some insight and intuition that is best conveyed person-to-person. More than once, these conversations helped me realize another question I had for another expert, who was often present or within earshot. On the other hand, BIRS was an excellent venue to tell interested colleagues about some of my own recently completed work that may be useful or interesting to them. This meeting was particularly gratifying to me, because some ideas I first gleaned from informal conversations at two earlier BIRS meetings in the past decade, in both Banff and Oaxaca, recently bore substantial fruit. I can remember specific ideas and insights from those two meetings, which directly led to a half dozen of my recent papers and a few upcoming ones. The present meeting was a chance to present some of that recent and current work, and it was highly gratifying to do so in a place that, in my memory at least, seeded the initial ideas.
Mathematics and Statistics, Amherst College
