Seattle, Shuffleboard, Vitaly

Abstract

During my last year as a doctoral student the opportunity arose to attend a conference at the University of Washington in Seattle. This was an ‘NSF-CBMS Regional Conference in the Mathematical Sciences’ event entitled ‘Algebraic Ideas in Ergodic Theory’, comprising a series of lectures by my supervisor Klaus Schmidt. The event had been organised by Doug Lind, my first collaborator, and Selim Tuncel, who had also been a doctoral student in dynamics at Warwick a few years earlier. Part of the structure of these events is an expectation that the principal speaker produce a set of lecture notes, and these lecture notes helped me understand something of the wider world my own work lived in.