Category: News Postings

The Fields Institute in Toronto will host a semester-long program in Combinatorial Algebraic geometry, June-December 2016. (Not 2014, as this post said earlier.). The program will focus on the topics in algebraic geometry with deep combinatorial connections. These will include, but are not limited to, Hilbert schemes, moduli spaces, Okounkov bodies, Schubert varieties, toric varieties, and tropical geometry. Program activities will consist of a summer school, three workshops, graduate courses, special lectures, colloquia, seminars, and more. For more information, keep an eye on the program web page.

We are saddened by the news that Andrei Zelevinsky passed away on April 10.
Andrei was best known for his work with Gelfand and Kapranov on “Discriminants, Resultants, and Multidimensional Determinants” and for the introduction with Fomin of the theory of cluster algebras. There is a conference in his honor planned in just two weeks. We will update this post if there is any change to that plan.
update: The webpage for the conference says that the conference will continue as previously planned, in memory of Andrei.

A bit of site news: we’ve removed the conference calendar that used to reside at commalg.org/conference-calendar/. It apparently stopped working sometime recently, though we only just discovered it. The software that generated it is no longer supported, so for now we’ve decided to remove it.
What we don’t know is whether it will be missed. So please let us know: did you use the calendar? Would you like it to come back? You can leave a quick comment on this entry. We’d appreciate your feedback.

Recently there’s been something of an explosion of mathematical videos. Not only are there “popular math”-type videos (e.g. Vi Hart‘s videos on hexaflexagons and much more), the Simons Foundation has been posting a series of interviews with Deligne, Manin, and others, and more and more conferences are now recorded, such as the introductory workshop “Cluster Algebras and Commutative Algebra” at MSRI in August, and many many lectures of interest at BIRS in Banff (examples 1, 2, 3). These videos are great resources for the community, particular grad students and postdocs. You can “virtually” attend a conference today! Thanks to Irena Peeva for the prompt.

We’re saddened to announce that Shreeram S. Abhyankar passed away at his home on November 2. Abhyankar was a giant of twentieth-century mathematics, making deep contributions to algebraic geometry, commutative algebra, group theory, and combinatorics. He will be missed.

The Executive Committee of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) has established the AWM-Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory to highlight exceptional research in some area of algebra by a woman early in her career. The prize will be awarded every other year with the first prize presented at the AWM Reception at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Baltimore, MD in January 2014. Here’s the press release.

Luchezar Avramov, David Eisenbud, and Irena Peeva are organizing the 7-day MSRI Workshop “Representation Theory, Homological Algebra, and Free Resolutions”, Feb 11, 2013 to Feb 17, 2013. To apply for funding, you must register by Mon, Oct 15 2012. Graduate students and postdocs should arrange that their Ph.D. advisor e-mails a brief recommendation letter to the organizers.

Rodney Sharp writes, “I took the attached photo of David and Joan Rees on David’s 94th birthday (last Tuesday, May 29) at the care home where he now lives. It might remind some users of the conference we had about 14 years ago in Exeter to celebrate David’s 80th year, and the one we had 24 years ago to mark his 70th birthday.”
Many thanks, Rodney. It’s good to see them both.  For those who may not know much about David Rees FRS, here is some background: wikipedia, mathscinet, math. genealogy.

David Eisenbud has been named as the next director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California. His four-year term starts August 1, 2013. (He was previously Director of MSRI 1997-2007.) Congratulations, David! It’s great news for the visibility of commutative algebra and algebraic geometry, as well as for mathematics in general.

The Simons Foundation has announced the first round of Simons Fellows in Mathematics (previously on commalg.org), and it includes a number of our colleagues in commutative algebra and closely related fields. Congratulations to Robert Guralnick, Srikanth Iyengar, Irena Peeva, and Bernd Ulrich on this honor! (Hope we didn’t accidentally miss anyone!)