Author: Graham Leuschke

The recent PASI 2009 conference in Olinda, Brazil has spawned a Facebook group! There are many many photos from the conference available there, as well as conversations about the conference and links to other photos (on the conference website, from Manoj Kummini and Marcela Silva).
You need a Facebook account to see the PASI 2009 group and photos.

We’ve learned that Michel André of Ecole Polytechnique Federale (Lausanne, Switzerland), author of Homologie des algèbres commutatives and the André of André–Quillen homology, died in a mountain accident in July. Our thoughts are with his family and friends. Thanks to Rodney Sharp and Markus Brodmann for sharing the sad news.

We received the following announcement:
Dear Macaulay 2 user,
With funding from the NSA, we are organizing a Macaulay 2 workshop, from Friday, January 8, 2010 through Tuesday, January 12, 2010, with Thursday January 7 and Wednesday January 13 serving as the travel days. We note that this is just before the annual Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco, and that the location of the workshop will be the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, CA. Activities will start first thing Friday morning (possibly Thursday night).
The purpose of the workshop is to bring the Macaulay 2 developers together with those who would like to share or to develop their skills at writing packages for Macaulay 2 and at developing the corresponding mathematical algorithms. Sample software projects that might be undertaken are visible here (although this page is rather out of date at this point and we are looking for participants who might have new packages they are interested in).
Continue reading “Macaulay2 Workshop at MSRI”

John Abbott has posted two sets of photos from recent events in Barcelona: the mini conference celebrating Robbiano’s 65th birthday, and the CoCoA summer school. Go see!

We’ve learned that the University of Graz, Austria, is inviting applications for a Professor in Algebra (f/m). The announcement explicitly mentions “Commutative Algebra” as a potential area of expertise. The deadline for applications is September 6th, 2009. You can read the announcement (in German) here, and an unofficial and abbreviated translation in English here .

We’re saddened to hear of the passing of David Kirby, who worked in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry, and is well remembered for his work on Artinian modules, Koszul complexes, and multiplicities. He died on 29 March 2009, aged 76. There is a brief notice in the Newsletter of the London Mathematical Society. Thanks to Rodney Sharp for sharing this sad news with us.

We’ve got the seven-year itch! Since our grand opening in February 2002, we’ve been proud to be the website of the commutative algebra community. The web has gone through a number of generations since then, and it’s about time commalg.org caught up with the times. We therefore present commalg.org 2.0: the quickening.
The basic look and feel of the website hasn’t changed much, but the software beneath the surface has. We’re now using WordPress, and we hope that it will allow us to make updates more easily and more often. It also produces a number of Atom feeds (see the bottom of any page, under “Syndicate”) to make following us easy.
It also lets us do nifty things like this conference calendar, which we’re very excited about. (It’s available as a webcal feed, for those of you who know what that means.)
We hope you’re as excited about the new face of commalg.org as we are. If you have any concerns or suggestions, please let us know!
Click here to read the full list of changes at commalg.org…

Tim Römer from the University of Osnabrück, Germany, writes:

…maybe it is interesting for commalg that our department is offering 2 postdoc-positions in the area of commutative algebra and algebraic topology. See [the department website] for details.