I’m attending the conference Microlocal and Global Analysis, Interactions with Geometry in Potsdam this week; it’s being held at the University of Potsdam in the Neues Palais, which is literally a palace (in typical German math department style, cf. the Department of Mathematics at Leibniz Universitat, which is in a castle.)

The conference is dedicated to Professor Bert-Wolfgang Schulze on the occasion of his 75th birthday; he created this conference (which has been an annual event for some years) and has made significant contributions to the field.

The schedule is very busy, and already halfway through the second day there have been a number of good talks related to my research interests. In particular, I was impressed by Francesco Bei, “Degenerating Hermitian metrics and spectral convergence” in which he gave strong results of the spectrum of the Hodge-Kodaira Laplacian on Hermitian complex spaces, and Gerardo Mendoza, “Singular foliations by tori” in which he classified closed manifolds foliated by Killing fields in a manner analogous to the classification of line bundles by their Chern classes. I’m looking forward to the rest of the conference, I’ll update here as it goes!

I should mention, I was able to present a poster on my joint research on H-type foliations with Fabrice Baudoin, Erlend Grong, and Luca Rizzi. My thanks to the conference for this opportunity!

Update, Thursday 7 March:

The fourth day of the conference has wrapped up, and it’s continued to present very good speakers. On Wednesday Irina Markina talked about the Cauchy-Szegö kernel for the quaternionic Seigel uppee half space, which was very interesting and had a surprising number of connections to my recent studies in Clifford algebras, and Wolfram Bauer presented his work (joint with Irina Markina) on ultrahyperbolic operators on pseudo H type groups, which is a different generalization than the H type foliations I’ve recently been involved with. Both were excellent talks. I would be remiss not to mention that Fabrice Baudoin presented our paper (with Erlend Grong and Luca Rizzi) on H type foliations. It was well presented and well received. It was a very good day for topics close to my interests!

On Thursday there were two talks on index theory that caught my attention; Maxim Braverman spoke about Callias type operators and index theory on noncompact manifolds, and Paolo Piazza presented work about K-theory classes and their properties on a type of singular manifold. Georges Habib also talked about the Bochner formula for Riemannian foliations, which I found very familiar.

There was a dinner on Wednesday night at the Krongut Bornstedt, a brewery that has served the conference for many years. The beer was as great as I remember from last year, and I had a great conversation with several very good speakers from the conference!