Category: News Postings

Today is the 13th birthday of commalg.org. Since our grand opening in 2002, we’ve tried hard to be a useful resource to the commutative algebra community, and we are grateful to the community for its appreciation.
If you’re interested in joining the commalg.org team, please get in touch. We’re thinking about the future of commalg.org, and you could be involved.
Anyway, thanks again!

Alexander Grothendieck, one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century, has died at the age of 86.

• AMS obituary.
• Obituary in New York Times.
• Obituary in Le Monde (in French).
• Another French obituary.
• “A country of which nothing is known but the name”: Pierre Cartier remembers Grothendieck
• “As if summoned from the void,” from the 2004 Notices of the AMS: part 1, part 2.
• Wer ist Alexander Grothendieck? (in German, from the 2006 Oberwolfach lecture by Winfried Scharlau
• A blog post by Steven Landsburg

From Amnon Neeman:

Dear Colleagues,
The Journal of K-Theory is very sick and might die soon, you can find more detail in
http://www.math.illinois.edu/K-theory/1025/JKT_final_announcement.pdf
Please feel free to pass this on to interested parties (for example librarians). I’m happy to inform you that there’s a bright side to the decline and possible demise of the Journal of K-Theory. The new journal, the Annals of K-Theory, is already accepting submissions, see the web page
http://www.ktheoryfoundation.org/journal.html
It’s only fair to let you know that the new journal will have to have a higher standard than the old one, in 2016 it will only be publishing 350 pages (down from 1200 for Journal of K-Theory).
Let me encourage you to submit great papers!
Yours, Amnon

We are deeply sad to share with the commalg community that Mara Neusel passed away on Friday 5 September.
Mara Neusel was a professor at Texas Tech University. She worked mainly in the invariant theory of finite groups and commutative algebra.
Our thoughts are with her friends and family.

We are saddened to announce that Jan Strooker passed away on August 16, 2014. Jan Strooker was born 29 September 1932 in Rangoon. He was professor in Algebra at Utrecht University. In the seventies and eighties he was a driving force behind the study of algebraic K-theory in the Netherlands. Later his interest moved to “Homological questions in commutative algebra”, as witnessed by his book of that title.

We are saddened to announce that Vikram B. Mehta passed away on June 04, 2014. Professor Mehta was a senior member of the Mathematics Faculty at Tata Institute of fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai. He was a member of the Indian National Academy of Sciences and a recipient of the SS Bhatnagar Award. Mehta was known mainly for his work with the study of semi-stable bundles and questions of Schubert varieties, and particularly for the notion of Frobenius splittings in algebraic geometry.

We are sad to report that Hans-Bjørn Foxby passed away on 08 April 2014. The University of Copenhagen’s Department of Mathematical Sciences has posted a short obituary.

On March 17, 2014, the Mathematical Society of Japan awarded the “MSJ Algebra Prize” to Yuji Yoshino for his contributions to the representation theory of Cohen-Macaulay rings. He is the third commutative algebraist to be awarded the prize; previous winners include Kei-ichi Watanabe and Shiro Goto.
Warmest congratulations to Yuji Yoshino!

We are saddened to learn that Günter Scheja (academic genealogy, MathSciNet), who worked in commutative algebra, algebraic geometry, and several complex variables, passed away January 26.
Here is an obituary in German and in English translation.

Aron Simis sends in this photo of Jean-Louis Koszul, taken in Grenoble France.
Aron writes, “I wonder if this of interest to the community to post the picture. I consider it quite rare, since I spent most of my mathematical life talking about “Koszul” and finally met my mathematics in person!”
Also in the photo (l to r): Marcel Morales, Mikhail Zaidenberg, ??, Koszul, Simis, Lê Tuân Hoa, Santiago Zarzuela.