MSRI will hold a semester-long program in Hyperplane Arrangements and Applications, August 16, 2004 to December 17, 2004.
The program will focus on several inter-related aspects of current research in the field:
- Topology of the complement – characteristic and resonance varieties, fundamental groups, higher homotopy groups, cohomology of local systems.
- Commutative and skew-commutative algebra — modules of derivations, resolutions, Orlik-Solomon algebras, Koszul duality and lower central series formulas.
- Applications — generalized hypergeometric functions, Gauss-Manin connections, KZ equations, quantization, elliptic and $q$KZ equations, discriminants, flat connections and braid group representations, Artin groups, moduli spaces and Grassmann strata, subspace arrangements, wonderful models.
- Combinatorial methods — lattice homology, group representations, combinatorial models, isotopy and homotopy type, random walks.
The MSRI page for the program has more information, as well as several pretty pictures.