Category: News Postings

We are saddened to learn that David Rees has passed away, peacefully in hospital in Exeter, aged 95.
Commalgists will know Rees’ name through the familiar expressions ‘Rees rings’, ‘Rees algebras’ and the ‘Artin–Rees Lemma’. The concept of reduction of an ideal in a local ring, introduced in a paper written jointly by Douglas Northcott and David Rees about 60 years ago, continues to be much used and frequently cited in the 21st century.

Release the balloons! We just added post number 500 to the commalg.org database. (Appropriately enough, it was this post about a Macaulay2 workshop.)
We’d like to take advantage of this milestone to thank you, the users of commalg.org, for your support and encouragement over the last 12 years (12 years!). It’s a service we love providing to the community, and we don’t plan to stop.
Thanks,
Graham Leuschke
Moira McDermott
Sean Sather-Wagstaff
the commalg.org team

The distinguished German mathematician Egbert Brieskorn passed away on 11th July. Brieskorn was best known for his work in singularity theory, particularly in deformations, resolutions, and connections (!) with Lie groups. See G.-M. Greuel’s “Some Aspects of Brieskorn’s Mathematical Work” from a 1998 birthday conference for Brieskorn, or the Simons Foundation’s 2010 interview with Brieskorn, for more about his life and work.

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.