Designing the Young Topologists Meeting 2024

From 5 to 9 August 2024, the Young Topologists Meeting came to the University of Münster. YTM is a conference run by and for early-career topologists: PhD students and postdocs give most of the talks, and two lecture series anchor the week. This year they were Ishan Levy (Copenhagen) on Telescopic computations in algebraic K-theory and Arunima Ray (MPI Bonn) on From knots and links to 4-manifolds.

I was on the organizing committee, together with Konrad Bals, Etienne Batelier, Edith Hübner, Marin Janssen, Alexander Kutzim, Lukas Stöveken, Maximilian Tönies and Thomas Tony. I also drew the logo, and Natalia Pacheco-Tallaj did the graphic design around it.

The logo

The letters Y, T and M are drawn as flames, hot pink with cyan shadows, and the T in the middle is split by a lightning bolt. They sit inside a yellow seal with a scalloped edge, somewhere between a sun and a sticker. Everything has a heavy black outline, so the logo reads both large on the banner and small in the corner of each day of the schedule.

The schedule

Natalia and I made the schedule together. Each day is its own lime-green card with the logo in the corner, speakers in cyan, and titles in black; the coffee breaks, lunches and the poster session (“with finger food!”) get their own bands. Yellow smiley stickers and pink and cyan bursts are scattered across the page, and a last panel says where things are: talks in M1 and M2, coffee breaks and the poster session in the Cluster Lounge, and a silent room in the SRZ. Here is the full schedule, page by page:

The palette is the same everywhere: hot pink, cyan, lemon yellow and lime on teal and lilac.

YTM 2024 was supported by the Cluster of Excellence Mathematics Münster, the K-theory Foundation and the Foundation Compositio Mathematica. Banner: © Natalia Pacheco-Tallaj (graphic design) & Rin Ray (logo). Schedule: © Natalia Pacheco-Tallaj & Rin Ray. Photos of the week, by Arye Deutsch, are on the conference page.