Participant Testimonials

Jun 19 - Jun 24, 2011

Through my participation at the BIRS workshop, I made several new contacts and learned quite a lot. I began a collaborative project with Yair Glasner (whom I just met for the first time) and Miklos Abert on generic graphings and invariant random subgroups. I also learned a lot from Anders Karlsson (whom I met for only the second time) about his work on random walks and possible applications to a current research project of my own. Also I spoke frequently with Russell Lyons and Vadim Kaimanovich, learning about the current work which impacts my own very much. I also spoke with Yuval Peres on reverse martingales - which might impact some of my work on pointwise ergodic theorems. All in all, it was a very enjoyable and fruitful conference.

Lewis Bowen Mathematics, Texas A&M

I am definitely very happy that I participated to this workshop: it was very helpful to meet people interested in my same topic. Moreover I had the possibility to exchange some ideas about mathematics with some of the participants. It is even possible that some collaborations will arise after this visit, but it is still too early to say. Since I am still a PhD student, this workshop was very helpful to get more involved in the topic, and to think further in the perspective also of a possible postdoc. During this workshop I have learned many new things, and got more information about the ones I knew. I hope there will be more workshops like this one!

Elisabetta Candellero Dottoressa Magistrale
Department of Mathematical Structure Theory, Graz University of Technology

This week was very fruitful for me. I made some new contacts, that gave me some feedback on the research I presented. I had several stimulating discussions, where some of my ideas was potentially useful for others, in for me unexpected way. A couple of the talks directly lead to a research project, that I want to work on the coming months. It concerns trying to modify the methods in a recent paper of mine to problems of another type. I will the two scientists again in the fall at MSRI and my hope is to be able to report on progress in this direction then. At present time, there seems to be no effect on jobs for me or my students or postdocs, except for the general network building. People were very excited about the workshop. Many said that all talks were very interesting and stimulating. I agree. So the impact is/will be significant on the subject. It was a very well chosen topic(s), quite of current interest and activity.

Anders Karlsson Mathematics, University of Geneva

There were great talks and I met new people. It is too soon to say there will be new collaborations, but that is possible.

Russell Lyons Mathematics, Indiana University

The workshop was a great opportunity to me to be in contact with a community slightly different from that I used to be in permanent contact. The presence of certain people has been crucial for instance to solve some problem concerning my most recent publications.

Andres Navas PhD
Mathematics, Universidad de Santiago de Chile