Category: News Postings

Javid Validashti has posted some photos from the recent 2nd Bluegrass Algebra Conference in Lexington. Thanks for sending them along, Javid! Go see!
added 19 March: We’re sad to hear that Jim Huckaba, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Missouri, died on Tuesday March 10. Jim was a widely respected and admired commutative algebraist. His son, Sam, works in commutative algebra as well.
The Huckaba family is establishing a memorial scholarship fund at MU. Contributions can be made by check (to University of Missouri, with a note saying it is for the “James A. Huckaba Memorial Scholarship Fund”) and sent to Carmen Chicone, Department of Mathematics, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211.

Thanks to Leslie Roberts and Tony Geramita, we’ve posted some photos from last month’s Route 81 Conference. Go see!
update: (14 Dec 2008) The organizers of the Barcelona conference on Interactions between Representation Theory and Commutative Algebra have posted some photos from the conference, including group pictures. Go see!
update: (16 Dec 2008) Thanks to Adam Van Tuyl, we’ve posted some photos from the recent CMS Winter Meeting in Ottawa. Go see!

Karl Schwede sent along these photos from last August’s conference in honor of Mel Hochster. Thanks, Karl! Go see!
Also, we learned that the TWAS (Academy of Sciences for the Developing World) Council met 9 November 2008 in Mexico City, Mexico, and announced that Prof. Vasudevan Srinivas, India, is the recipient of the TWAS 2008 Prize in Mathematics. Congratulations to Srinivas!

We received the following from Amelia Taylor and Greg Smith:

Dear Colleague:
We are excited to announce the launch of The Journal of Software for Algebra and Geometry: Macaulay 2. This new electronic-only journal is devoted to short articles on software related to research in algebra and geometry. Each article (not to exceed 3 printed pages including references) will be accompanied by the appropriate source code. The aim is to promote the development of good code for use by the mathematical research community. All articles are refereed. More information can be found at the journal website: http://j-sag.org/.
— Greg Smith and Amelia Taylor

Also, the organizers of the conference “Geometric, Homological and Combinatorial Aspects in Commutative Algebra” have posted photos from the conference at the conference website. Go see!

From Irena Swanson and Craig Huneke: The book “Integral Closure of Ideals, Rings, and Modules”, by Craig Huneke and Irena Swanson, is now available online at http://www.reed.edu/~iswanson/book.
From the AMS: HENRI CARTAN, 1904-2008
Henri Cartan, one of the outstanding mathematicians of the twentieth century, died August 13 at the age of 104. Cartan, the son of mathematician Elie Cartan, was one of the founding members of the Bourbaki group and made important contributions to many areas of mathematics, including complex analysis, algebraic topology, and homological algebra. He co-authored Homological Algebra with Samuel Eilenberg and ran the Seminaire Cartan in Paris from 1948 to 1964. Cartan was elected to more than a dozen academies in Europe, the U.S., and Japan, and received the Wolf Prize in 1980. In addition to his work in mathematics, he is also known for his efforts to promote human rights and for restoring relations between mathematicians in France and Germany after World War II. More about Cartan’s life and work is in “Interview with Henri Cartan” by Allyn Jackson in the August 1999 Notices.
Also Manuel Blickle has posted some photos from the recent conference in honor of Mel Hochster.
Update 28 August: We have learned that Masayoshi Nagata passed away on 27th August at the age of 81. Our thoughts are with his friends and family.

We’re sorry to announce that Jack E. Ohm, emeritus professor at Lousiana State University, passed away on Saturday, May 24 in Pensacola, Florida. Our thoughts are with his family.

Juan Migliore has posted some pictures from the recent Hartshorne conference. Go see!

We’ve posted a conference announcement for a Macaulay2 workshop in June. Participation is by application/invitation, and the deadline is very soon, so check it out.
In other Macaulay2 news, we received the following from Dan Grayson:

Dear Colleague,
Macaulay 2 is a computer program devoted to supporting research in algebraic geometry and commutative algebra. We’ve been working hard on the latest release of Macaulay 2, and now version 1.1 is ready for download from our website. We hope you will try it out. You can download it here.
Installation is easy. Versions have been compiled specifically for the following GNU/Linux systems: generic Linux, Ubuntu (32 bit and 64 bit), Debian (32 bit and 64 bit) both with *.deb files, Fedora 7, Fedora 8, and Red Hat Enterprise 4, with *.rpm files; for the following Macintosh OS X systems: 10.4 and 10.5 on Intel 32 bit, 10.5 on Intel 64 bit, and 10.4 on the Power PC; and on Microsoft Windows with the Cygwin compatibility package installed. Automatic installation and updating from our repositories is possible for Debian, Ubuntu, and Microsoft Windows with Cygwin.
Documentation has been improved, with every function documented. Browse the latest version at our web site.
It is easy to write, document, and distribute Macaulay 2 code. Packages have been contributed and included with Macaulay 2, including: NoetherNormalization, by Bart Snapp and Nathaniel Stapleton; GenericInitialIdeal and Regularity, by Alexandra Seceleanu and Nathaniel Stapleton; InvolutiveBases, by Daniel Robertz; ChainComplexExtras, by Frank Moore and Gregory G. Smith; HyperplaneArrangements, by Graham Denham and Gregory G. Smith; LexIdeals, by Chris Francisco; ReesAlgebra, by David Eisenbud, Amelia Taylor, and Sorin Popescu; and TangentCone, by Craig Huneke and David Eisenbud.
Packages can be posted on our web site for instant downloading and installation. Frequent updating by the author is possible. See here for more information.
We’re hoping to help even more people get started with writing packages for Macaulay 2. Those interested should contact us and consider applying by March 1 for our workshop at the end of June.
An interface with TeXmacs has been provided, so Macaulay 2 can be run with a good graphical user interface with beautiful formatting of Macaulay 2 output.
A good implementation of real and complex numbers to arbitrary precision, based on the mpfr library from mpfr.org, has been implemented. The library is remarkable for the care taken to return correctly rounded results. It is hoped that this addition will form a good base for experimentation with algebraic algorithms that mix symbolic and numeric techniques. Basic transcendental functions are provided. An interface to lapack routines for singular value decomposition and eigenvectors is provided.
A more complete list of improvements and bug fixes is available on the website.
Let us know whether you have any problems getting started, and we’ll do our best to help you.
Dan Grayson
Mike Stillman

The Rocky Mountain Mathematics Consortium has unveiled a new journal dedicated to commutative algebra. The appropriately named Journal of Commutative Algebra “publishes substantial results in the area of commutative algebra and closely related fields” and is now accepting submissions.
Also, we’ve posted some photos from the conference in honor of Juergen Herzog in Cortona, Italy, last September. Thanks to Winfried Bruns and Tim Roemer for sending us the links! Go see!
update: Back in October we posted a link to a paper of Eisenbud and Schreyer proving (among other things) the Multiplicity Conjecture of Huneke-Srinivasan in characteristic zero. A new version of their paper removes the assumption on characteristic, giving the Multiplicity Conjecture over any field. Nice!

Holger Brenner and Paul Monsky have posted a preprint entitled “Tight closure does not commute with localization” to the arXiv. This answers possibly the biggest question in tight closure theory.
In similar news, David Eisenbud and Frank-Olaf Schreyer have posted a preprint entitled “Betti Numbers of Graded Modules and Cohomology of Vector Bundles”. In particular, this paper contains a proof of the characteristic-zero case of a famous conjecture of Huneke and Srinivasan on the relation between multiplicities and Betti numbers.
Finally, we’ve posted some photos from the conference in honor of Juergen Herzog in Cortona, Italy, last September. Thanks to Winfried Bruns and Tim Roemer for sending us the links! Go see!