Intuitive Geometry Workshop and Intuitive Geometry Day in Calgary (August 31, 2007-September 3, 2007)

This two-day workshop was organized to provide a much desired opportunity to share research findings in the interconnected fields that are represented in Intuitive Geometry. The term Intuitive Geometry was coined by László Fejes Tóth to denote those geometric disciplines in which the unifying theme is that their problems themselves can be explained fairly easily, even to an advanced high school student, however, the solution of these problems require diffucult and very deep methods of modern mathematics. This Workshop is also part of a series of Intuitive Geometry conferences the first of which was organized in 1975 in Tihany, Hungary, and the last one was in 2000 in Balatonföldár, Hungary. This workshop was the sixth such meeting. The Intuitive Geometry Workshop was immediately followed by the Intuitive Geometry Day in Calgary held at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Calgary. The Intuitive Geometry Day was a direct continuation of the Intuitive Geometry BIRS workshop. Its main purpuse was to provide an extension to the BIRS event and thus make attendance of the workshop more desirable to colleagues from overseas. In this regard, the event was a great success, out of the 30 participants 11 were from outside North America. The 30 participants of the meetings gave 24 high quality research talks on their recent results of which 16 were 30-minute and 8 were 20-minute presentations. Subject of talks covered the broad areas of general convexity, iterative geometric processes, the theory of packing and covering both in Euclidean and hyperbolic spaces, polytopal approximation of convex bodies, Minkowski geometry, combinatorial geometry, the theory of geometric transversals, extremal problems for convex sets, and abstract and convex polytopes. The workshop was a resounding success, it brought together researchers from many different fields of Geometry, and among them, 3 advanced graduate students and several postdoctoral fellows. New collaborations among participants are already noticable, especially among the graduate students and postdocs. Results presented at the Workshop and the Intuitive Geometry Day in Calgary will be published in a special Intuitive Geometry volume of the journal Periodica Mathematica Hungarica. In summary, the future directions for research in Intuitive Geometry are plentiful and the area is very much alive being a central part of modern geometric research. The Intuitive Geometry Day in Calgary was generously supported by the Pacific Instutite for the Mathematical Sciences, the Faculty of Science, and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Calgary.