The Chronology of a Program

To practice for this blog, I decided to post a few entries about how we conceived and organized the Thematic Program. Maybe such historical account will be useful for people organizing similar programs in the future, who knows ? At the very least it should be  entertaining for those who were involved.

The way I remember, it all started when Tom Hurd and I were enjoying a pint near the river Cam back in 2005, when both of us were visiting the Isaac Newton Institute and convinced each other that we could run a program at the Fields Institute along the lines of the one we were just attending. For reasons that will become apparent in later postings, we settled on 2010 as our preferred year. Since five years would surely give us enough time to prepare everything, we returned to our pints with a certain sense of accomplishment.