BIRS Workshop — Spaces of Manifolds: Algebraic and Geometric Approaches

The concept of manifold in mathematics corresponds approximately to the everyday idea of a smooth surface --- think of soap bubbles or sheets of fabric --- except that it can have any number of dimensions. A question that lies at the origin of topology, the mathematics of shape, is: can we write down a list of all manifolds? At first, such a classification was attempted through numerical invariants. Over time, the focus of algebraic topology has shifted from using numerical invariants to the algebraic objects underlying them, and then ascended further to studying moduli spaces. This workshop concerns recent breakthroughs in this philosophy for studying of manifolds, combining higher-algebraic methods with novel geometric techniques.