Participant Testimonials
The week at BIRS (off teaching duties, off kids, with inspiring people around) was perfect. I got a lot of work done, new ideas coming up, a paper finished. Many people seemed interested in my work. It was truly wonderful. It's hard to say if the workshop affected my students' job prospects, but contacts and staying in touch and publicizing our work surely has a long term affect on this.
Mathematics, Tel Aviv University
This was not my first participation to a 5-days BIRS workshop; it was maybe my fourth visit to Banff and BIRS, and every time I come to this place I love it more! During this particular meeting I could present a part of my recent research, and it was a good occasion to exchange opinions, ideas and impressions with other participants who are working on the same, or on similar, topics, in particular Vitali Milman, Liran Rotem, Artem Zvavitch and Dima Ryabogin. This exchange will influence for sure my future directions of research. Moreover I had the opportunity to work with Monika Ludwig, a participant from Vienna, on the research subject that I am liking most in this period, i.e. classification of valuations on function spaces. We had several fruitful discussions which helped us to enter a bit more in this topic, which is still almost unexplored. BIRS represents for me a place where I can devote myself entirely (or almost entirely) to do research, forgetting the rest of the world for one week!
Mathematics, University of Florence
This stay at BIRS had important impact on my current research, since after the talk a colleague mentioned some techniques that I was not aware of. Additionally this led into new collaboration.
Institute of Analysis, Johannes Kepler University Linz
The perfectly organized workshop at BIRS stimulated my interest in some new and important questions which were presented in the talks. I am quite sure that this will lead to new publications on these important problems on the borderline between convex geometry and Banach space theory.
There were three talks that I liked very much. This is much more than I usually experience in a one week conference. These were the talks by Monika Ludwig, Dima Ryabogin and Shiri Artstein (she gave two talks the second on Friday after I left. I'm talking about: "Viterbo's conjecture implies Mahler" which included a very nice introduction to symplectic geometry). I also learned about a result of Prochno and Schutt in a talk by Prochno (I should have known about it independently of the conference but somehow it escaped me until now). I managed to simplify and generalized their main result and am writing a short note about it.
For the past two meetings which I attended at BIRS, I met people from my field who I almost never see elsewhere, hence the chance to talk on specific problems, still open, in my area. At this particular meeting, I also appreciated the variety of talks many of which reported on recent progress. Overall, the meeting was very beneficial for my research in what concerns both the update in the field and the professional contacts.
Really appreciate that BIRS provides a wonderful research environment. It was always my pleasure to be there for great research workshops. Thanks for your great job.
It is so nice for geometers and analysts gathering and exchanging ideas. The organizers did a great job. The program and the speakers are carefully selected and arranged in a professional way.
