Category: News Postings

We’ve learned that Michel André of Ecole Polytechnique Federale (Lausanne, Switzerland), author of Homologie des algèbres commutatives and the André of André–Quillen homology, died in a mountain accident in July. Our thoughts are with his family and friends. Thanks to Rodney Sharp and Markus Brodmann for sharing the sad news.

We received the following announcement:
Dear Macaulay 2 user,
With funding from the NSA, we are organizing a Macaulay 2 workshop, from Friday, January 8, 2010 through Tuesday, January 12, 2010, with Thursday January 7 and Wednesday January 13 serving as the travel days. We note that this is just before the annual Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco, and that the location of the workshop will be the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, CA. Activities will start first thing Friday morning (possibly Thursday night).
The purpose of the workshop is to bring the Macaulay 2 developers together with those who would like to share or to develop their skills at writing packages for Macaulay 2 and at developing the corresponding mathematical algorithms. Sample software projects that might be undertaken are visible here (although this page is rather out of date at this point and we are looking for participants who might have new packages they are interested in).
Continue reading “Macaulay2 Workshop at MSRI”

We received the following announcement from Greg Smith and Amelia Taylor:
Dear Colleague:
We are excited to announce the publication of the first issue of
The Journal of Software
for Algebra and Geometry: /Macaulay 2/
This new electronic-only journal is devoted to software for research in algebra and geometry, accompanied by short articles that explain their use and purpose. The software is in the form of packages for use with the Macaulay2 system, though this may be broadened at a later time to include other systems as well. All software and articles are refereed, and the software is made available with the Macaulay2 distribution. The first issue can be found at http://j-sag.org/current.html and its contents are
EdgeIdeals: a package for (hyper)graphs
Christopher A. Francisco, Andrew Hoefel, and Adam Van Tuyl
Computing inclusions of Schur modules
Steven V Sam
and both papers are accompanied by the relevant, refereed Macaulay 2 package. For other information regarding the journal, see http://j-sag.org/.
Issues will be published quarterly and announced through an e-mail list. If you would like to receive such announcements please go to http://j-sag.org/announce.html and complete the brief subscription form.

John Abbott has posted two sets of photos from recent events in Barcelona: the mini conference celebrating Robbiano’s 65th birthday, and the CoCoA summer school. Go see!

We’ve learned that the University of Graz, Austria, is inviting applications for a Professor in Algebra (f/m). The announcement explicitly mentions “Commutative Algebra” as a potential area of expertise. The deadline for applications is September 6th, 2009. You can read the announcement (in German) here, and an unofficial and abbreviated translation in English here .

We’re saddened to hear of the passing of David Kirby, who worked in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry, and is well remembered for his work on Artinian modules, Koszul complexes, and multiplicities. He died on 29 March 2009, aged 76. There is a brief notice in the Newsletter of the London Mathematical Society. Thanks to Rodney Sharp for sharing this sad news with us.

We’ve got the seven-year itch! Since our grand opening in February 2002, we’ve been proud to be the website of the commutative algebra community. The web has gone through a number of generations since then, and it’s about time commalg.org caught up with the times. We therefore present commalg.org 2.0: the quickening.
The basic look and feel of the website hasn’t changed much, but the software beneath the surface has. We’re now using WordPress, and we hope that it will allow us to make updates more easily and more often. It also produces a number of Atom feeds (see the bottom of any page, under “Syndicate”) to make following us easy.
It also lets us do nifty things like this conference calendar, which we’re very excited about. (It’s available as a webcal feed, for those of you who know what that means.)
We hope you’re as excited about the new face of commalg.org as we are. If you have any concerns or suggestions, please let us know!
Click here to read the full list of changes at commalg.org…

Tim Römer from the University of Osnabrück, Germany, writes:

…maybe it is interesting for commalg that our department is offering 2 postdoc-positions in the area of commutative algebra and algebraic topology. See [the department website] for details.

We’ve added a new feature to our people page: a map of all the commutative algebraists on our list! Five continents and dozens of countries, with fascinating distributions. If you see any problems with our data, just let us know.

We’d like to pass on the news from the Directors of AIM, IAS, IMA, IPAM, MBI, MSRI, and SAMSI that about 30 new postdoctoral positions are likely to become available soon, pending support by the NSF. The seven NSF funded Mathematical Sciences Institutes invite applications for these positions. Persons who have received a PhD from a U.S. institution in the mathematical and statistical sciences within the last 5 years and who do not have employment for the Fall of 2009 are requested to apply online at mathinstitutes.org. Offers may be made as early as April 10.