Given a polynomial in two or more variables, one may study the zero locus from the point of view of different mathematical subjects (number theory, algebraic geometry, ...). I will explain how tropical geometry allows to encode all topological aspects by elementary combinatorial objects called "tropical varieties." Mohammed Abouzaid received a B.S. in 2002 from the University of Richmond, and a Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of Chicago under the supervision of Paul Seidel. He is interested in symplectic topology and its interactions with algebraic geometry and differential topology, in particular the homological mirror symmetry conjecture. Since 2007 he has been a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, and a Clay Mathematics Institute Research Fellow.

Stable commutator length answers the question: "what is the simplest surface in a given space with prescribed boundary?" where "simplest" is interpreted in topological terms. This topological definition is complemented by several equivalent definitions - in group theory, as a measure of non-commutativity of a group; and in linear programming, as the solution of a certain linear optimization problem. On the topological side, scl is concerned with questions such as computing the genus of a knot, or finding the simplest 4-manifold that bounds a given 3-manifold. On the linear programming side, scl is measured in terms of certain functions called quasimorphisms, which arise from hyperbolic geometry (negative curvature) and symplectic geometry (causal structures). In these talks we will discuss how scl in free and surface groups is connected to such diverse phenomena as the existence of closed surface subgroups in graphs of groups, rigidity and discreteness of symplectic representations, bounding immersed curves on a surface by immersed subsurfaces, and the theory of multi- dimensional continued fractions and Klein polyhedra. Danny Calegari is the Richard Merkin Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology, and is one of the recipients of the 2009 Clay Research Award for his work in geometric topology and geometric group theory. He received a B.A. in 1994 from the University of Melbourne, and a Ph.D. in 2000 from the University of California, Berkeley under the joint supervision of Andrew Casson and William Thurston. From 2000 to 2002 he was Benjamin Peirce Assistant Professor at Harvard University, after which he joined the Caltech faculty; he became Richard Merkin Professor in 2007.

In a series of three papers from 2002-2003, Grigori Perelman gave a spectacular proof of the Poincare Conjecture (every smooth compact simply connected three-dimensional manifold is topologically isomorphic to a sphere), one of the most famous open problems in mathematics (and one of the seven Clay Millennium Prize Problems worth a million dollars each), by developing several new groundbreaking advances in Hamilton's theory of Ricci flow on manifolds. In this talk I describe in broad detail how the proof proceeds, and briefly discuss some of the key turning points in the argument. About the speaker: Terence Tao was born in Adelaide, Australia, in 1975. He has been a professor of mathematics at UCLA since 1999, having completed his PhD under Elias Stein at Princeton in 1996. Tao's areas of research include harmonic analysis, PDE, combinatorics, and number theory. He has received a number of awards, including the Salem Prize in 2000, the Bochner Prize in 2002, the Fields Medal and SASTRA Ramanujan Prize in 2006, and the MacArthur Fellowship and Ostrowski Prize in 2007. Terence Tao also currently holds the James and Carol Collins chair in mathematics at UCLA, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Australian Academy of Sciences (Corresponding Member).