Event Details

The first Western Pacific Topology workshop and conference is designed to ignite new partnerships amongst the growing communities in Australia and Korea in areas closely related to algebraic topology.

Algebraic Topology has established itself as a central topic within mathematics – it has played a major role in solving problems of great interest to mathematicians and physicists in variety of other areas. Many Fields Medalists of the preceding 50 years have contributed to or used algebraic topology in their work: Atiyah, Grothendieck, Milnor, Quillen, Serre and Veovodesky. Algebraic Topology is also a pure subject frequently applied: persistent homology is combinatorial algebraic topology applied to data science; neurotopology is the application of combinatorial algebraic topology to neuroscience. The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Kosterlitz, Haldane, and Thouless for their use of Algebraic Topology in materials science.

The subject is rapidly growing in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region: recent appointments in Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney have built up the numbers and brought young algebraic topologists to Australia, while recruitments in closely related areas have been made in Korea and Japan.

This workshop and conference series will bring to Australia and Korean experts together, with workshops in a carefully cultivated range of topics related to algebraic topology which will foster communication and future collaboration.

The workshop will provide Australian researchers of all career stages with a chance to network with some of the world’s best in this area and to develop new regional partnerships.