1st ANNOUNCEMENT OF SUMIRFAS 2009 The Informal Regional Functional Analysis Seminar August 7 - 9 Texas A&M University, College Station

Schedule: Talks for SUMIRFAS will be posted on the Workshop in Analysis and Probability page, URL

http://www.math.tamu.edu/research/workshops/linanalysis/

The first talk will be in the early afternoon on Friday and the Seminar concludes by lunch time on Sunday. All talks will be in Blocker 169. The Blocker Building is on Ireland St. just south of University Dr. on the Texas A&M campus:

http://www.tamu.edu/map/building/overview/BLOC.html.

Coffee and refreshments will be available in Blocker 148.

Speakers at SUMIRFAS 2009 include

Lewis Bowen, Orbit equivalence flexibility Dorin Dutkay, Fourier series on fractals Daniel Freeman, The universality of ell_1 as a dual space Maria Girardi, Operator-valued martingale transforms and applications Richard Haydon, TBA Peter Kuchment, TBA Hangfen Li, Convex analysis and noncommutative Choquet boundary Mikhail Ostrovskii, Unitarizable representations and fixed points of groups of biholomorphic transformations of operator balls Mihai Popa, On the conditionally free analogue of the S-transform Sorin Popa, Group measure space decomposition of factors and W*-superrigidity Rachel Ward, Quiet sigma delta quantization: removing noisy periodicities in analog-to-digital conversion

Rafal Latala, Assaf Naor, and Grigoris Paouris (chair) are organizing a Concentration Week on "Probability in Asymptotic Geometry" for the week of July 20-24. This Concentration Week will focus on high dimensional phenomena concerning convex bodies, random polytopes, and random matrices. These topics lie in the intersection of probability, analysis, geometry, and combinatorics. The goal is to expose the huge variety of techniques used in the study of these objects and to explore the connections between them.

Marius Junge, Jesse Peterson, and Gilles Pisier (chair) are organizing a Concentration Week on "Operator Spaces and Approximation Properties of Discrete Groups" for the week of August 3-7. Particular emphasis will be taken to tie together recent results from the theory of von Neumann algebras with operator space ideas. The intention is to provide a background for common points of interest from different perspectives through courses on operator spaces and Dirichlet forms in von Neumann algebras. The intention of this concentration week is to attract attention of younger researchers and students to these new openings.

We expect to be able to cover housing for most participants from support the National Science Foundation has provided for the Workshop. Preference will be given to participants who do not have other sources of support, such as sponsored research grants. When you ask Cara to book your room, please tell her if you are requesting support. Minorities, women, graduate students, and young researchers are especially encouraged to apply.

For logistical support, including requests for support, please contact Cara Barton cara@math.tamu.edu. For more information on the Workshop itself, please contact William Johnson johnson@math.tamu.edu, David Larson larson@math.tamu.edu, Gilles Pisier pisier@math.tamu.edu, or Joel Zinn jzinn@math.tamu.edu.

For information about the Concentration Week "Probability in Asymptotic Geometry" contact Grigoris Paouris grigoris@math.tamu.edu.

For information about the Concentration Week on "Operator Spaces and Approximation Properties of Discrete Groups", contact Gilles Pisier pisier@math.tamu.edu.