Category: News Postings

From Jorge Neves:

The UC|UP Joint PhD Program in Mathematics, run by the Universities of Coimbra and Porto, in Portugal, welcomes applications for the academic year 2016/2017.
The Program will offer a number of doctoral scholarships (covering tuition fees and living expenses) to selected candidates. Funding will be made available from the support of the national agency FCT and the associated research centers.
All areas of Mathematics are covered in the Program, in particular:

• Algebra
• Analysis/Differential Equations
• Discrete Mathematics/Combinatorics
• Dynamical Systems
• Geometry/Topology
• Numerical Analysis/Optimization
• Probability/Statistics

The first call for applications is open from December 1, 2015 to January 31, 2016:
http://www.mat.uc.pt/phd_prog
Extensive information about the Program is available at the website (and additional questions can be posed using phd_prog@mat.uc.pt).

Warmest congratulations to this year’s class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, including commutative algebraists Karen Smith and Dale Cutkosky!

From Dan Grayson:

Version 1.8.1 of Macaulay2 has been released, and distributions for various architectures are available on the web site at http://macaulay2.com/. The source code is also available in the downloads section, if we don’t have a release for your architecture.
This is a minor but recommended update to 1.8, whose release suffered a minor glitch, and was available only briefly. The lists of changes is available onthe web site.

Speaking of Macaulay2, we here at commalg.org have hosted since 2002 (!) a page about installing M2 on Windows. It is now out of date in every possible way, and we will be retiring it in the near future. If you know of some reason this is a bad idea, please get in touch with us as soon as possible.

In case you missed it, Google posted a doodle celebrating the 133rd Birthday of Emmy Noether.  It goes without saying that Emmy Noether played a prominent role in the development of commutative algebra, as well as other fields of mathematics. This being the case, we would like to join Google in saying happy birthday to Emmy. More information about the Doodle can be found in the following link:
https://www.google.com/doodles/emmy-noethers-133rd-birthday

Today is the 13th birthday of commalg.org. Since our grand opening in 2002, we’ve tried hard to be a useful resource to the commutative algebra community, and we are grateful to the community for its appreciation.
If you’re interested in joining the commalg.org team, please get in touch. We’re thinking about the future of commalg.org, and you could be involved.
Anyway, thanks again!

Alexander Grothendieck, one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century, has died at the age of 86.

• AMS obituary.
• Obituary in New York Times.
• Obituary in Le Monde (in French).
• Another French obituary.
• “A country of which nothing is known but the name”: Pierre Cartier remembers Grothendieck
• “As if summoned from the void,” from the 2004 Notices of the AMS: part 1, part 2.
• Wer ist Alexander Grothendieck? (in German, from the 2006 Oberwolfach lecture by Winfried Scharlau
• A blog post by Steven Landsburg

From Amnon Neeman:

Dear Colleagues,
The Journal of K-Theory is very sick and might die soon, you can find more detail in
http://www.math.illinois.edu/K-theory/1025/JKT_final_announcement.pdf
Please feel free to pass this on to interested parties (for example librarians). I’m happy to inform you that there’s a bright side to the decline and possible demise of the Journal of K-Theory. The new journal, the Annals of K-Theory, is already accepting submissions, see the web page
http://www.ktheoryfoundation.org/journal.html
It’s only fair to let you know that the new journal will have to have a higher standard than the old one, in 2016 it will only be publishing 350 pages (down from 1200 for Journal of K-Theory).
Let me encourage you to submit great papers!
Yours, Amnon

We are deeply sad to share with the commalg community that Mara Neusel passed away on Friday 5 September.
Mara Neusel was a professor at Texas Tech University. She worked mainly in the invariant theory of finite groups and commutative algebra.
Our thoughts are with her friends and family.

We are saddened to announce that Jan Strooker passed away on August 16, 2014. Jan Strooker was born 29 September 1932 in Rangoon. He was professor in Algebra at Utrecht University. In the seventies and eighties he was a driving force behind the study of algebraic K-theory in the Netherlands. Later his interest moved to “Homological questions in commutative algebra”, as witnessed by his book of that title.

We are saddened to announce that Vikram B. Mehta passed away on June 04, 2014. Professor Mehta was a senior member of the Mathematics Faculty at Tata Institute of fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai. He was a member of the Indian National Academy of Sciences and a recipient of the SS Bhatnagar Award. Mehta was known mainly for his work with the study of semi-stable bundles and questions of Schubert varieties, and particularly for the notion of Frobenius splittings in algebraic geometry.