The Boot Camp for the 2015 Algebraic Geometry Summer Research Institute

University Of Georgia Research Foundation Inc, Athens GA

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports the participation of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in the "Boot Camp" preceding the American Mathematical Society (AMS) Summer Institute in Algebraic Geometry on July 6-10, 2015 at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. The algebraic geometry community has developed the now longstanding tradition of running an institute every ten years with the purpose of convening a majority of practitioners in the world to overview the developments of the past decade and to outline the most pressing and far-reaching problems for the next. The next AMS Summer Institute in Algebraic Geometry will take place at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, on July 13-31, 2015. Increasingly, algebraic geometry has become so diverse and technically demanding that it is daunting for graduate students and postdocs to master the techniques and wide range of activity that occurs in the field beyond their immediate areas of study. It has thus become imperative to run a "boot camp" in the week preceding the institute designed exclusively for advanced graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. The purpose of the boot camp is threefold: 1) To familiarize the participants with a broad range of developments in algebraic geometry in an informal setting, thus increasing their ability to follow discussions and participate at the institute. 2) To introduce young algebraic geometers to their peers and the previous generation of experts in order to increase collaborations and form a support group for young researchers. 3) To introduce young researchers to new techniques and questions in order to make them more effective researchers. The boot camp will focus on several subjects in algebraic geometry that have seen significant advances in the last decade, including birational geometry, Bridgeland stability, the Hassett-Keel program, p-adic Hodge theory, Shimura varieties, perfectoid spaces, the tautological ring of the moduli spaces of curves, Boij-Soderbeg theory, and singularities in characteristic p. The choices of topics are results of coordination with the organizers of the AMS Summer Institute in Algebraic Geometry. The boot camp will have wide-ranging broader impacts as it will introduce the most dynamic and brightest young algebraic geometry graduate students and postdocs to each other. It is expected that many new collaborations will result from this interaction. In addition to the scientific benefits, young researchers will form a support network of their peers, which can significantly improve retention and success in the STEM disciplines. More details about the boot camp can be found at its website: http://www.math.utah.edu/~defernex/Bootcamp2015/home.html.