Author: Graham Leuschke

The American Mathematical Society and the Clay Mathematics Institute plan to sponsor a three week Summer Institute in Algebraic Geometry at the University of Washington, Seattle from July 25 to August 12, 2005. The goals of the Institute are to review the major achievements of the past decade and to look forward to future developments.
The focus will be structured by week:

• 7/25-7/29 Interactions with physics,
• 8/1 -8/5 Classical geometry,
• 8/8 -8/12 Arithmetic geometry.

Plenary lecture series aimed at broad audiences will be scheduled in the morning. More specialized seminar sessions will take place in the afternoon.
The Institute is in the decennial tradition of the conferences in Santa Cruz (1995) and Bowdoin (1985).
For more information, please see the conference web page.

A CIMPA-UNESCO-IRAN School on Grobner Bases and Applications will be held 9-22 July 2005, at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences, Zanjan, Iran. The school will present different aspects of computational methods in commutative algebras and algebraic geometry and their applications in various branches of mathematics, to introduce students and young researchers who can apply these methods in their work.
Lecturers will include: B. Buchberger, L. Buse, M. Chardin, A. Conca, G-M. Greuel, L. Robbiano, B. Sturmfels.
For more information, see the conference web page on the CIMPA site, or contact the local organizer, R. Zaare-Nahandi.
update: More information about the school is available at the IASBS web site.

Anurag Singh (Georgia Tech) and Uli Walther (Purdue) are organizing a Joint AMS-IMS-SIAM Summer Research Conference on Commutative Algebra at Snowbird, Utah, Sunday June 19 — Friday July 1, 2005.
This conference is intended for graduate students. The topic will be commutative algebra, with special emphasis on topics that are related to local cohomology and its interactions with other areas of mathematics such as algebraic geometry, topology, and D-modules. Some part of the workshop will be devoted to algorithmic questions and explicit computations.
The workshop comes in two parts. The first part will include introductory lectures by the organizers and other young researchers in the field, as well as some problem and computer sessions. The second part at the end of the summer school will be a 3-day conference centered around the topics of the workshop involving senior speakers. There will be some hiking activities in the Wasatch mountains.
For more information, see the conference web page.

At the Joint meeting of the AMS, DMV, and OMG in Mainz, Germany, June 16-19 2005, there will be two special sessions of interest to commutative algebraists.
A Special Session on Hilbert functions and Syzygies will be organized by Uwe Nagel (Kentucky), Irena Peeva (Cornell), and Tim Römer (Osnabrück). For more information, see the AMS page for the Session.
Also, there will be a Special Session on The Multiplicative Arithmetic of Integral Domains and Monods. The organizers of this Session are: Franz Halter-Koch (Graz), Ulrich Krause (Bremen) and Scott Chapman (San Antonio). See the AMS page for this Session for more information.

The Eighth International Symposium on Effective Methods in Algebraic Geometry (MEGA 2005), will be held May 27th — June 1st, 2005, in Porto Conte, Alghero, Sardinia (Italy). The Symposium focusses on “Computing in and with algebraic geometry: Theory, Algorithms, Implementations, Applications”.
Here is a rough schedule for the Symposium:
May 26, Thursday: Arrival and registration.
May 27, Friday: Registration (Morning) and Talks
May 28, Saturday: Talks
May 29, Sunday: Free
May 30, Monday: Talks
May 31, Tuesday: Talks
June 1, Wednesday: Talks
June 2, Thursday: Breakfast and departure
The programme consists of
Contributed Talks
Short Communications
Software Exhibitions
Invited Speakers:

• E. Allman (University of Southern Maine, USA)
• P. Fitzpatrick (University of Cork, Ireland)
• H. Hauser (Institut für Mathematik, Innsbruck, Austria)
• B. Poonen (University of California, USA)
• T. Theobald (TUM, Germany and Yale University, USA)

For more information, see the MEGA 2005 web page.

COCOA’s Fourth International School on Computer Algebra will take place at Corte Rosada Hotel in Porto Conte, Italy (near Alghero, Sardinia), 23-26 May, 2005.
The usual COCOA meeting will not follow the School. Instead, this year, the international meeting on computer algebra, MEGA05 will immediately follow the School, in the same location. MEGA will begin in the afternoon of May 27.
There will be two Courses and one Mini-Course:

• Course 1: Juan Migliore, University of Notre Dame (8:30 – 10:30 am, Mon.-Thursday morning), “Experiments in Commutative Algebra and Algebraic Geometry”. (With tutorials by Martin Kreuzer)
• Course 2: Serkan Hosten, San Francisco State University (11:00-13:00, Mon.-Thursday morning), “The Combinatorics of Syzygies”. (With tutorials by Anna Bigatti)
• Mini-Course: John Abbott, University of Genoa (Thursday afternoon), “Modular methods in CoCoA”.

There is space in the school for at most 18 participants, who should currently be enrolled in a doctoral programme somewhere in the world or be recent postdoctoral fellows. All students who are accepted for admission to the School will receive a scholarship which will cover some of the expenses associated with their participation. Please see the web page for the School for more information, including instructions for how to apply. For further information, contact one of the organizers, Anthony Geramita or Lorenzo Robbiano.

In order to celebrate the many wonderful contributions Roger and Sylvia Wiegand have made to the commutative algebra community, there will be a conference at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, May 7-9, 2005.
The conference is for recent Ph.D.s and graduate students in the field to meet experienced researchers, to learn about recent developments in commutative algebra, to exchange ideas with one another, and to develop collaborations for future research.
The conference will be organized by David Jorgensen and Aihua Li. For more information, see the conference web page.
update: See some photos from Wiegandfest!

There will be a workshop on “Kommutative Algebra” at Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach, April 24th – April 30th, 2005. The workshop is organized by Winfried Bruns (Osnabrück), Hubert Flenner (Bochum), and Craig Huneke (Kansas). For more information, see the MFO home page.