Format:    Mornings will be devoted to mini-courses and afternoons to talks.
There will be 4 mini-courses of three 50-minutes lectures each, and 20 talks of 30 minutes each.
We will also organize two poster sessions.  the schedule and the abstracts are now available.

Mini-courses:
Stephen Bigelow (Melbourne) -  "Representations of braid groups" -Abstract
Michel Boileau (Toulouse)  -  "Non-free actions of finite groups on the three-sphere" -Abstract
Dale Rolfsen (Vancouver)  -  "Braids, knots, 3-manifolds and orderable groups" - Abstract
Alexander Varchenko (North Carolina)  -  "Multidimensional hypergeometric functions and representation theory" -Abstract

Talks:
Joan Birman (New York)  - "Transverse knots" -Abstract
Daniel Cohen (Baton Rouge) -"Gauss-Manin connections for arrangements"-Abstract
Fred Cohen (Rochester)  - "Representations of pure braid groups and associated vector bundles" -Abstract
Corrado De Concini (Roma)  -  "Some facts on the cohomology of Artin and Coxeter groups"-Abstract
Patrick Dehornoy (Caen)  - "Homology of Gaussian groups" -Abstract
Roger Fenn (Sussex) - "The birack: an invariant of (virtual) knots and links"-Abstract
Emmanuel Giroux (Lyon)  - "Open books, closed braids and contact structures" -Abstract
John Guaschi (Toulouse) -"Roots of the full twist in surface braid groups" -Abstract
Simon King (Darmstadt) - "Links and the geometry of triangulations of S^3"-Abstract
Toshitake Kohno (Tokyo)  - "Surface braids and the moduli of flat connections"-Abstract
Mustafa Korkmaz (Ankara) - "The second homology groups of mapping class groups of orientable surfaces" - Abstract
Gregor Masbaum  (Paris) - "Alexander-Conway polynomial, Milnor numbers, and a new matrix-tree theorem"-Abstract
Hugh Morton (Liverpool)  - "Choosing a basis for Homfly decorations" -Abstract
Stefan Papadima (Bucharest) -"Braids and Koszulness" -Abstract
Luis Paris (Dijon)  - "On a theorem of Artin" -Abstract
Bernard Perron (Dijon) -"A new definition of the Casson invariant" -Abstract
Claudio Procesi (Roma)  - "Braid versus symmetric group cohomology" -Abstract
Kyoji Saito (Kyoto)  - "The polyhedron dual to the Weyl chamber system"-Abstract
Mina Teicher (Bar Ilan)  - "Computational problems related to braid monodromy type"-Abstract
Miguel Xicotencatl (Cinvestav) - "Orbit configuration spaces and surface braid groups" -Abstract

Posters:
Mark Baker (Rennes)  - "Arithmetic knots in closed 3-manifolds"
Valerie Bardakov (Novosibirsk)  - "On some property of braid groups"
Magnus Bergqvist (Uppsala)  - "Classical invariants for holonomic knots"
Oleg Bogopolski (Novosibirsk)  - "On an analog for surface groups of a theorem of Magnus"
Alessia Cattabriga  (Bologna)  - "(1,1)-knots and the mapping class group of the twice punctured torus"
Corinne Cerf (Bruxelles)  - "Link graphs"
Nuno Franco (Dijon) and Juan Gonzalez-Meneses (Sevilla)  - "Minimal simple elements in Garside groups"
Louis Funar (Grenoble)   - "On a universal mapping class group in genus zero"
Christine Lescop (Grenoble)  - "An alternative presentation of the Ohtsuki filtration on the space of homology 3-spheres"
Daniel Lines (Dijon)  - "Varieties of representations of virtual knot groups in SL_2(C)"
Alexandre Mednykh (Novosibirsk)  - "Hyperbolic and spherical volumes for knot and link orbifolds"
Mathieu Picantin (Caen)  - "Presentations for dual braid monoids"
Michael Polyak (Technion)   - "Polynomials and cubic complexes"
Leonid Potyagailo (Lille)  - "Splittings and endomorphisms of hyperbolic manifolds groups"
Michael Stein (Northwestern)  - "Parametrized braid groups associate to Chevalley groups"
Tangul Uygur (Anadolu)  - "The space of irreducible SU(2) representations of 2-bridge knots of type (2,n)"
 

Participants:
Click here to see the list of participants.
 

Registration:
Registration is now closed. You may contact the organizers directly if you wish.
 

Location:   Cortona is a small village at the heart of Tuscany, from which Florence can be reached by train in about one hour,
and Rome, Siena, and Pisa in about two hours. The conference will be held in the Renaissance palace ``Il Palazzone,'' a conference
resort owned by the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, where also several rooms for participants are available.
Please click here for a description of ``Il Palazzone'' and an explanation of how to reach it,
and right-click here to download a printable leaflet containing the same material plus one photo.

Financial support for participants: We are planning to cover the accommodation and living expenses of all speakers.
No registration fee will be asked, and coffee-breaks will be free.

Related event:  The First Joint Meeting of the American Mathematical Society and the Unione Matematica Italiana
will take place in Pisa, June 12-16, 2002, and it will include a special session on the topology of 3-manifolds.
See here for details on this special session and here for general information about the Pisa meeting.