Participant Testimonials

Jan 29 - Feb 03, 2012

I worked closely with Chris Laskowski on a continuing project related to my talk and made significant progress. The talks of Kim and Scow helped clarify a further paper I am working on. The paper of Hils may resurrect a project that has been on the back burner. Discussions with Tanevic and Haskell were helpful with my editorial responsibilities with the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic. Many other talks provided inspiration and insight that should be helpful in the future.

John Baldwin Professor, Emeritus
Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago

On February 2009 when a similar Classification theory (model theory) Workshop was help at BIRS, I talked with Dr. John Goodrick for the first time. Then we promised to start a research project together. Some months after, he and I and Alexei Kolesnikov met together and started a research project: A category theoretical understanding of model theoretic amalgamation. This project was very successful and resulted as a joint paper accepted in Israel Journal of Mathematics. The project was continued and we are now developing model theoretic homology theory connected with our earlier work. We already submit our some 70 page homology paper, and continue to work on extending the results in the paper. All these fruition began with the mentioned BIRS Worshop. Moreover in the new BIRS Workshop (Neostability theory), I and John met again, and we work and talk together. On Thursday evening in the lounge, we finally resolve the problem how to compute the higher homology group of a canonical higher groupoid. This is a big jump toward the study on computing higher homology groups and on solving our related conjectures. We express our deep thanks to the meeting organizers and BIRS administrators and staffs who support all this happening. Finally I want to mention the following. During the workshop, Dr. Joon Kim (who graduated in 2011 under my supervision) gave a talk. Many audience including scholars from Bogota, Colombia seemed impressed by his talk. And I just received an email from Joon Kim that he will get an official postdoc offer from Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia. This is a great help as well to the beginning-stage Korean logic community. Joon Kim is the first Ph. D. ever produced in South Korea specialized in mathematical logic. So his success as a research scholar is crucial in growing Korean logic community.

Byunghan Kim Professor
Mathematics, Yonsei University

First of all many thanks for giving me the opportunity to take part in this conference, in such a beautiful, inspiring and well organized environment. It gave me the opportunity to have constructive talks with at least two people coming from very far away, which is not always as successful when writing emails. It also allowed me to meet new researchers having close interests to mine, which could be a first step towards future projects. Of course, it also permitted to have an up to date overview of what people are looking at in my field of research : I did learn a lot.

Cédric Milliet mathematics, Galatasaray Üniversitesi