Participant Testimonials
The workshop was an occasion to start discussions with colleagues that should result in new collaboration. These discussions provided me with new insight on at least two topics of central interest to my investigations, namely orthogonal polynomials in the plane and rational approximation. Besides, new advances in the field of pluripotential theory and energy discretization were presented in a series of talks that strongly interested me, and will almost certainly influence my research. Altogether, the meeting was very fruitful as far as I am concerned.
One of the fascinating sides of this conference was the diversity and the great quality of the talks (thanks to all participants!). There were several groups working on different aspects of orthogonal polynomials leading to interesting interactions. I believe everyone could see and learn something new; meet old and new friends. I personally had discussions with quite a few of the participants and this will definitely have an impact on my short and long term research plans. ... I would like to thank the staff at BIRS for the superb organization and working conditions! It is much easier to organize a conference with this team on your side! This was my first conference at Banff and I was impressed with the facilities and the setting.
I had a very good time in Banff, which is nothing new. I have always enjoyed my visits to BIRS and I wish BIRS continued success. Specifically to the current program, I enjoyed many of the lectures and had extended discussions with Eric Rains and Yan Xu. I had a three hour meeting with Rains and it was most productive and mutually beneficial. It will lead to some new research work. I also discussed possible research collaboration with Plamen Illiev and Jacob Christiansen. The conference was very successful.
Mathematics, City University of Hong Kong and King Saud University
I was very pleased to be able to participate at the BIRS workshop. In addition to meeting old friends and colleagues, I also learned about new important developments. Of particular interest is the new development of pluripotential theoretic methods in several complex variables that I was not previously aware of. The workshop was extremely stimulating.
As always, BIRS provided a very nice setting for our meeting. And, as usual, the most beneficial aspect for me were some small group discussions outside of the lectures. At least one specific research question I had was solved (not by me!), and several other questions were presented to me for the first time. The talks themselves I found to be of a rather uneven quality, some good, some not so good; but this is likely more to my ignorance of many facets of the material. All in all, I found the conference to be very useful.
The workshop was interesting and well organized. Conditions could hardly have been better.
It was a very useful meeting - because both univariate and multivariate people were together, which is unusual. I learnt a lot, especially about pluripotential theory.
School of Mathematics, Georgia Institute of Technology
From a scientific point of view, this time was very great to me. The level of the talks was very impressive with top speakers who presented their last contributions and contribute with discussions in our "free moments" to continue our learning. On the other hand, the work done by the organizers (T. Bloom, J. S. Geronimo, P. Iliev, D. Lubinsky and E. B. Saff) must be pointed out by their precision. The atmosphere was very friendly as well as the facilities of the BIRS. This was my third stay in BIRS in the last 7 years and I can send you my congratulations for your support.
This was a good workshop with a lot of interaction and excellent talks.
Mathematics, University of Szeged and University of South Florida
The BIRS workshop I attended was quite helpful since I met well known experts in the field who gave talks on their recent work, but even more important was to meet younger researchers and to see what they are doing. I was helpful to them because I could explain that some of their work is related to work that has been done before, but it was interesting to see that they were able to move on from where others stopped in the past. I invited some of the postdocs to visit my university and this may result in new collaboration or even a visiting position for some of them. Meeting some of my collaborators certainly was helpful for my ongoing work with them and some new open problems have been mentioned, which may lead to (joint) papers. At least one paper will result from my visit, since I intend to prepare a paper about the talk I gave, taking into account some of the comments of the other participants.
I benefited a lot from attending this conference. The circumstance provided by Banff centre was pleasant. In the lectures given by the experts and during the informal discussions with them, I learned many new results and fresh insights in the area of orthogonal polynomials. I went to Banff with a blank notebook, and I come back with plenty of interesting problems. In a word, this workshop is very helpful to my future research.
I learnt a lot of new mathematics by attending the many interesting talks during the conference. Also, it was great to have the evenings to speak to experts who are working in similar areas. In fact, my current collaboration project started because I had the time to speak to someone who's based in Europe.
Mathematics, Georgia Tech
This is an excellent workshop: well organized, diverse, high quality talks. I learnt several new things, exchanged ideas with several old friends and colleagues, and renewed my acquaintance with several other people. All in all, a very positive experience and a loud Thank You to the organizers to BIRS.
