Manifold Atlas:Projects

Revision as of 11:11, 3 December 2010

This page provides information for Atlas users who are interested in projects.

What is a "Project" in the Manifold Atlas?

A project in the Atlas is a set of inter-related pages on a particular topic. See for example the bordism project.

The pages of a project should support and complement each other by:

• organizing what is known,
• recording important facts and theorems,
• pointing in the direction of further research.

Organisation

At a human level, a project should consist of the following:

• A project leader or leaders:
  • Their role is to make the MAP - i.e. build a page plan of the project and to manage its creation.
• Co-workers with the responsibility of developing a particular page or pages (or even just a section).

Scientific benefits

The scientific pay-off for projects includes the following points.

• The creation of a rapidly browsable over-view of an area with:
  • clear statements of basic definitions and the major theorems in an area,
  • tables e.g. of families of spaces, of homotopy groups, of bordism groups, of K-groups and L-groups, ... ,
  • surveys and references of the relevant literature.
• Once organized as above, such information outlines the contours of what is not yet known and so highlights places to start working.

A guide for project leaders

In order to lead a project you need a plan. A plan should contain at least the following.

• A list of page titles with topics and/or key-words for each page.
• A list of prospective writers for the intended pages:
  • You may wish to use the invitation records page to record the status of potential and actual writers.

Once you have a plan, you can place it on the project home page.

• The project home page will be a Category page in the Atlas. For examples see below.

It will be helpful if you can write a paragraph or two on the Category page describing your plans for the project.

This introductory material can easily contain open links with the title of pages you are hoping to start.

Leaders should be aware that related projects may be evolving in parallel at the same time: please try to be aware of possible synergies and overlaps with other projects.

Current projects

Below you will find lists of the current projects in the Atlas and the planned projects.

If you are interested in getting involved in a project or a planned project, please contact the project leader or e-mail the adiministraitors.

• Bordism: organised by Diarmuid Crowley and Matthias Kreck.
• Group actions on manifolds: organised by Krzysztof Pawałowski.
• Embeddings project: informally organised by Arkadiy Skopenkov.
• Surgery: to be organised by Andrew Ranicki.

Planned projects

• Aspherical manifolds: to be organised by Wolfgang Lück.
• Homogeneous spaces: to be organised by Stephan Klaus.
• L-theory
• 3-manifolds
• 4-manifolds
• Symplectic manifolds
• Positive curvature
• Index theory