Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Over Georgia Tech's fall recess, 8-11 October, 2017, an interdisciplinary conference called QMath13 was held at Georgia Tech.  QMath has become one of the major international events in mathematical physics since its beginning in 1987, but this was the first time the meeting was held in the US.  There were about 200 participants from many countries.  The conference was supported by the NSF with Evans Harrell as PI,  Federico Bonetto and Michael Loss as co-PIs at Georgia Tech, and David Borthwick as the co-Pi at Emory University.  It also received funding from IUPAP, IAMP, Microsoft, and some publishers.

QMath focuses on the mathematical problems of quantum mechanics.  In 2016 it was organized around the following themes:

• Quantum Mechanics with random features

• Quantum Mechanics on graphs and similar structures

• Many-body systems and statistical mechanics

• Quantum information

• New mathematical topics arising in current theoretical physics

The list of plenary speakers had plenty of star power:

*  Michael Aizenman

*  Fernando Brandao

•  Alessandro Giuliani

•  Svetlana Jitomirskaya

•  Peter Kuchment

•  Yoshiko Ogata

•  Michael Weinstein

•  Maciej Zworski

and the level of research presented in the special sessions and on posters was also impressive.

The last two themes mentioned above were among several innovations put in place by the organizing committee.  Quantum Information has become a major area of research bringing computer science, physics, and chemistry together with mathematics.  The final, open-ended theme was similarly designed with the purpose of keeping the conference and the field of mathematical physics current and exciting.  

Other noteworthy aspects of the conference were the following. 

          •  An evening event at the Clough Undergraduate Learning Center, at which Prof. Rafael Benguria gave a public lecture on the legacy of Maxwell, commemorating the event of 150 years ago in which mathematical analysis led to the understanding for the first time that light is an electromagnetic wave.

          •  A specially designed website was designed by Federico Bonetto to spread information and organize the meeting in an extremely user-friendly way, which was much appreciated by the participants.  The website is being kept in place at http://qmath13.gatech.edu/ for the indefinite future, to make information and archival materials, including video recordings of lectures, available to researchers in mathematical physics.

•  Outreach efforts that encouraged a relatively high participation of mathematical scientists from developing countries.

The reports of the conference by participants have been very positive, and the organizers hope that it will be a continuing inspiration to students and researchers, especially those at Georgia Tech, to be engaged in the very vibrant field of mathermatical physics.

Although the particular event took place in 2017, it has had ongoing activity since then and continuing into 2018, through a "Quolloquium" series of talks at Georgia Tech in Fall Semester, 2017, giving students and researchers in Atlanta a one-year-later update on the toipics covered at the meeting, as well as preparations for a refereed volume of articles by QMath13 participants.