This conference is the fifth in a series of triennial colloquia devoted to the mathematical legacy of Lars Ahlfors and Lipman Bers. The core heritage is in geometric function theory, quasiconformal mapping, Teichmüller theory and Kleinian groups, hyperbolic manifolds, and partial differential equations including Schramm/Stochastic-Loewner-Evolution/Equations. Today we see the influence of Ahlfors and Bers on algebraic geometry, mathematical physics, dynamics, probability, geometric group theory, number theory and topology.

We anticipate being able to feature roughly 40 seminar short (20 minute) seminar talks on Thursday March 24 and Friday March 25; a major goal of this session will be to expose the work of students and junior researchers as well as those who work outside the traditional research centers. As of March 8, the speakers have been decided and no new abstracts are being accepted.

The Fifth Ahlfors-Bers Colloquium is sponsored by the Department of Mathematics of Rice University, with additional support from the National Science Foundation pending. Since funds are limited, we will focus our support on students, early career mathematicians, researchers from underrepresented groups and from departments with lower levels of external support, and those without alternate sources of support. While we ask participants with alternate sources of support to allow us to focus our resources elsewhere, we welcome requests for funding from all participants and will do our best to meet all requests. As of March 8, we have allocated our funding for the Colloquium so that no more requests can be supported.