Category: News Postings

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!

Several people in the commalg community have dedicated or plan to dedicate articles to the memory of Anders J. Frankild. Lars Winther Christensen and Sean Sather-Wagstaff would like to assemble preprints of these articles in an unofficial volume to present to Anders’ family in January of 2008. If you have a paper you would like included in this collection, please contact Lars or Sean before the end of 2007 for more information.

We are pleased to announce the birth of Conor Joseph Leuschke on June 26, 2007, 5:55pm. Measurements: 8 pounds, 2 ounces, and 21 1/2 inches long. Congratulations to Moira and Graham!
Sean has posted some pictures from the workshop on Commutative Algebra and its Interaction with Algebraic Geometry at BIRS. Go see!
Juan Migliore has also posted some pictures from this workshop. The pictures of the bears at Lake Louise are numbers 18-29. Enjoy!
Brian Harbourne has also posted some pictures from this workshop.
Also, the group picture from this workshop can be found here.
Also, Marco Fontana has posted some pictures from the Abelian Groups and Modules over Commutative Rings Conference at the University of Connecticut. Go see!

We are deeply saddened to announce the passing of our friend and colleague Anders Frankild. He was undergoing treatment for leukemia, which had recently returned after a remission. Our thoughts are with his family.

We highly recommend this video of Jean-Pierre Serre, speaking on “How to Write Mathematics Badly”. The talk is apparently from the Harvard “Basic Notions” seminar in 2003, and is both educational and hilarious.
We recently learned of the existence of a wiki for academic positions in mathematics. It contains information about the status of faculty searches at various institutions posted anonymously by folks on the job market.
Speaking of jobs, we’ve learned from John Greenlees (email: J.Greenlees@sheffield.ac.uk) of a postdoctoral position to work on the project `Orientability and complete intersections for ring spectra’. The position starts Summer 2007 and has not been posted on the EIMS site. More information can be found at John Greenlees’ website or at one of the following job sites: http://www.shef.ac.uk/jobs/ or http://www.jobs.ac.uk/. The closing date is 04 April.

We’ve updated our announcement for the MSRI Workshop on Advances in Algebra and Geometry in April, to point out that the Workshop coincides with David Eisenbud’s sixtieth birthday and his imminent retirement as Director of MSRI. Thus one goal of the Workshop will be to honor David’s many and varied lifetime contributions to the vitality of the mathematical sciences.
Also, Holger Brenner has alerted us to a petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results that has (as of 04 Feb) almost 17,000 signatures.

We received the following from David Eisenbud:

Dear Algebraists,
We are thrilled to announce the launch of a new journal: Algebra & Number Theory
The purpose of the journal is to provide an alternative to the current range of commercial specialty journals in these fields – an alternative of higher quality and much lower cost.
The policies of Algebra & Number Theory are set by the editorial board, a group of working mathematicians, rather than by a profit-oriented company, so they will remain friendly to mathematicians’ interests. In particular, they will promote broad dissemination, easy electronic access, and permissive use of content to the greatest extent compatible with survival of the journal. The journal is published by Mathematical Sciences Publishers, using the efficient model that has proved successful for its other journals, such as Geometry & Topology.
Please encourage your library to subscribe! And submit your high-quality original articles to us!
For more information, see http://jant.org.
Best,
—
David Eisenbud, chair of the editorial board
Bjorn Poonen, managing editor
(on behalf of the editorial board)