Geometric Structures in Group Theory

Abstract

The overall theme of the conference was geometric group theory, interpreted quite broadly. In general, geometric group theory seeks to understand algebraic properties of groups by studying their actions on spaces with various topological and geometric properties; in particular these spaces must have enough structure-preserving symmetry to admit interesting group actions. Although traditionally geometric group theorists have focused on finitely generated (and even finitely presented) countable discrete groups, the techniques that have been developed are now applied to more general groups, such as Lie groups and Kac-Moody groups, and although metric properties of the spaces have played a key role in geometric group theory, other structure such as complex or projective structures and measure-theoretic structures are being used more and more frequently.