One of these lists: Primes-L or Mersenne, had mentioned having folks get
together at a number theory meeting. The third of these below might be
the ideal time--if folks were still interested we could contact the
organizors and arrange a session (I would be willing to). For example,
depending on interest, we could try to arrange talks on the history of
primes and Mersenne finding, or a panel discussion of
GIMPS/PrimeNets/Proth's future, papers on the basic heuristics of prime
searching... Since Primes-L/GIMPS both include folks at all levels of
math, there is room for a very wide variety of presentations. It would be
fun to organize these session(s).
=========
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is having a "Special Year
in Number Theory 1999/2000" which involves having a number of long term
visitors, and several meetings: (See http://www.math.uiuc.edu/nt2000/ )
Illinois Number Theory Conference, September 17-18, 1999
"One hour talks will be given by K. Alladi, P. Borwein, A. Pollington,
and K.S. Williams. There will be opportunity for about 20 contributed
talks." No registration fee.
Midwest Arithmetical Geometry in Cryptography Workshop, November 5 - 7,
1999
"This workshop is intended for people in academia and industry with a
basic mathematical background in group theory and number theory, wishing
to learn about the increasingly common applications of arithmetical
geometry to cryptography. The featured speakers are Neal Koblitz, Joe
Silverman, and Nigel Smart, each of whom will give three hour talks. There
will also be time for contributed talks."
(This one:)
*** Millennial Conference on Number Theory, May 21 - 26, 2000 ****
"Confirmed plenary speakers include G. Andrews, J. Coates, H. Darmon,
K. Ford, R. Graham, A. Granville, D.R. Heath-Brown, C. Hooley, W.-C. Li,
K. Murty, M. Nathanson, K. Ono, C. Pomerance, W. Schmidt, C. Skinner, K.
Soundararajan, R. Taylor, R. Tijdeman, and R.C. Vaughan. Several of the
plenary talks will be in the form of broadly accessible survey lectures.
Proceedings will be published."
AMS Sectional Meeting at Urbana, March 18 - 21, 1999
"We expect that around 70 talks at this meeting will be in number
theory."
Instructional Conference on Fermat's Last Theorem, Summer 2000
===
Postscript:
"Good" number theory meetings are relatively common, but this
"Millennial Conference" looks like it will be exceptional. The list of
speakers is already very impressive and they will have "broadly accessible
survey lectures" (though that couuld mean many things...) Because of that,
it may be worth folks going to the expense to come. What do you think?
Should we try to organize something?
Chris Caldwell
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