Author: Graham Leuschke

There will be a 5-day workshop on “Commutative Algebra: Homological and Birational Theory” at the Banff International Research Station, September 11-16, 2004.
The workshop will be organized by Ragnar-Olaf Buchweitz (Dept. of Mathematics, Univ. of Toronto), Paul Roberts (University of Utah), and Bernd Ulrich (Purdue University).
You can read more about the focus of the workshop at the BIRS web page for the conference.
update (21 Sept 04): We’ve posted some photos from the workshop, from the official BIRS photographer, Marc Chardin, Graham Leuschke, and Joe Lipman.

MSRI will hold a semester-long program in Hyperplane Arrangements and Applications, August 16, 2004 to December 17, 2004.
The program will focus on several inter-related aspects of current research in the field:

• Topology of the complement – characteristic and resonance varieties, fundamental groups, higher homotopy groups, cohomology of local systems.
• Commutative and skew-commutative algebra — modules of derivations, resolutions, Orlik-Solomon algebras, Koszul duality and lower central series formulas.
• Applications — generalized hypergeometric functions, Gauss-Manin connections, KZ equations, quantization, elliptic and $q$KZ equations, discriminants, flat connections and braid group representations, Artin groups, moduli spaces and Grassmann strata, subspace arrangements, wonderful models.
• Combinatorial methods — lattice homology, group representations, combinatorial models, isotopy and homotopy type, random walks.

The MSRI page for the program has more information, as well as several pretty pictures.

There will be a two-week summer school on “Interactions between Homotopy Theory and Algebra” at the University of Chicago, July 26 through August 6, 2004.
The summer school will explore connections between homotopy theory, commutative algebra and representation theory with the goal of enhancing research interactions and applications among these fields.
Introductory lecture series in the first week:

• Paul Goerss: Simplicial methods and model categories
• Craig Huneke: Local cohomology
• Henning Krause: Differential graded methods and derived categories

In the second week there will be expository lectures on related research topics. Speakers confirmed so far:

• Alejandro Adem: Group cohomology
• Ragnar-Olaf Buchweitz: What Arrows can Commutative Algebra pull from Quivers?
• John Greenlees: First steps in brave new commutative algebra
• Kathryn Hess: Rational homotopy theory
• Mark Hovey: TBA
• Srikanth Iyengar: Andre-Quillen homology

Both weeks will be aimed at graduate students and beginning researchers who have some background in either homotopy theory, commutative algebra or representation theory and who would like to learn about the interactions between these fields. A list of prerequisites is on the web page; a majority of these topics are covered in standard courses on homology and commutative algebra. Some of these topics are slightly more advanced though, and students will probably find it beneficial to brush up on some of these topics.
Organizers: Lucho Avramov, Dan Christensen, Bill Dwyer and Brooke Shipley
As more information becomes available it will be posted on the web site for the summer school.

There will be a meeting on Combinatorial Commutative Algebra at Oberwolfach, July 4-10, 2004. The organizers are Irena Peeva of Cornell University and Volkmar Welker, Marburg. For more information (and a photo of the participants!), see the MFO page for the meeting.

The Fourth China-Japan-Korea International Symposium on Ring Theory was originally planned to take place from June 24 to June 28, 2003, in Southeast University, Nanjing, China. This conference was put off for one year because of SARS problems. Now it will take place on June 24 -28, 2004 in Nanjing, China.
More information, including registration instructions, deadlines, and organizers’ contact information, can be found on the conference website.

First Announcement
A Conference in Algebraic Geometry
Projective Varieties with Unexpected Properties, a conference in honour of the 150^th anniversary of the birth of G. Veronese.
The conference will be held in Siena, Italy, June 8-12, 2004.
The aim of the conference is to give a description of the current “state of the art” in the study of varieties whose embedding has some ‘non-standard’ feature: e.g. ‘small’ k-secant variety, degenerate Gauss maps, varieties with many degenerate subvarieties, etc.
Also the aim is to present connections with many non-geometric sounding problems (e.g. in inverse systems, rank of tensors, polynomial interpolation, algebraic statistics, algebraic complexity theory, ..) with applications to other fields of Mathematics.
Organizing Committee: Luca Chiantini, Anthony Geramita, Cristiano Bocci.
Scientific Committee: Ciro Ciliberto (Chair), Brian Harbourne, Antonio Lanteri, Rosa Maria Miró-Roig, Kristian Ranestad.
Anyone who would like to participate with a contribution is invited to contact some member of the Scientific Committee with their proposal. All proposals will be considered by the full Scientific Committee.
More information on the schedule and about accommodations is available on the conference website and on the web pages of the members of the Organizing Committee (Chiantini, Geramita, Bocci).

The Department of Mathematics at the University of Utah will host a two week mini-course, titled “Classical Problems in Commutative Algebra”, on homological conjectures in commutative algebra, June 7-18 2004.
During the past 30 years, the homological conjectures and related questions have had a significant impact on the development of commutative algebra. These problems originated in the work of Serre, Auslander, Peskine, Szpiro, and others. In 1974, Mel Hochster gave an overview of these problems in a series of lectures providing answers to some of the questions and indicating further directions of research. Since then, important contributions were made by various experts and some of these conjectures have been solved. However, some of them still await answers. This area of research remains a rich one and is as influential today in the development of commutative algebra as it was decades ago.
The mini-course plans to introduce graduate students with some background in commutative algebra and young researchers to this area of research. The lectures will provide an introduction to the subject, an overview of the main contributions of the past decades, as well as a discussion of the remaining open questions. The first week will develop the fundamental concepts needed in the second week when the major directions of research will be discussed.
The program is designed for graduate students who have studied commutative algebra at the graduate level. Limited funding is available for a small number of students who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents through the VIGRE grant of the Department of Mathematics. Students and junior researchers with other means of support are also encouraged to apply. There is no registration fee and on-campus housing is available.
Speakers include Florian Enescu, Claudia Miller, Sean Sather-Wagstaff, Sandra Spiroff, Sankar Dutta, Ray Heitmann, Mel Hochster, and Paul Roberts.
For more information, see the minicourse webpage, where there is also a printable version of this announcement.