BEST Conferences, Boise, Idaho

9812810

Scheepers

This award will provide partial support for the featured speakers

and also for some graduate students and other young mathematicians to

attend the 1999, 2000, and 2001 BEST conferences, `BEST' being a

deceptively lighthearted acronym for `Boise Extravaganzas in Set Theory,'

a series of conferences devoted to one of the oldest and deepest topics

in the Foundations of Mathematics. The general format will be to build

each of the three-day conferences around four one-hour lectures by

distinguished set theorists and to round out the program with shorter talks

contributed by those attracted to the featured speakers. This strategy has

been successful in the past---the series of conferences began in 1992---and

participants are widely representative of set theoretic research across

the U.S. and Canada, with increasing participation from countries

overseas. Participation by younger mathematicians, by women, and by

underrepresented minorities has been encouraged. The talks are held in

barrier free classrooms at Boise State University, and efforts are made

to accommodate special needs among the roughly twenty annual participants.

The host institution provides office support and secretarial facilities

without cost to the participants or to the government.

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