The Penn math department expanded and improved its space for visitors in the last few years. Here is a view of the snowstorm from the window of the beautiful new visitor's office.

If you are in Philadelphia be sure to check out the Deformation Theory Seminar at Penn. Organized by Jim Stasheff, it features both young mathematicians and also seasoned veterans. Murray Gerstenhaber (a Penn professor) is a regular at this seminar. Another exciting Penn seminar is the Galois Seminar where you will find C.-L. Chai, T. Chinburg,  D. Harbater and F. Pop. This is in general a very curious audience and there are always lively conversations.  

Reading this new survey paper by B. Toën .... Derived Algebraic Geometry.

Its been a busy semester and between the semesters I will be doing some travelling. I just got back from a beautiful visit to Israel's newest university: Ariel University where I gave a talk in the math department. I am planning upcoming trips to UPenn to meet with Tony Pantev, Jonathan Block, Ron Donagi, Jim Stasheff and David Harbater. Then I will visit the IAS and meet Chris Brav and Vladimir Berkovich. I will then visit Oxford briefly to meet with Lino Amorim, Konstantin Ardakov, Kobi Kremnizer and Dominic Joyce. Finally, I will go to the University of Padova, (former employer of Galileo Galilei) to attend Higher structures in algebraic analysis and meet with Francesco Baldassarri and his student Federico Bambozzi. 

The "Motivic invariants and categorification" EPSRC Programme Grant research group at Oxford held a workshop on Monday 7 October - Wednesday 9 October. Talks were given by Emily Cliff, Dennis Borisov, Oren Ben-Bassat, Dario Beraldo,  Robert Laugwitz, Vittoria Bussi, Kobi Kremnizer, Balazs Szendroi, Dominic Joyce and Yan Ting Lam. Dominic gave an overview of his research program and his slides are available at this link.

Here are the titles of the talks

Monday 7 October room L4, basement, (new) Mathematical Institute

9.30 Emily Cliff: A factorization structure on the Hilbert scheme of points on a surface

11.0 Robert Laugwitz: Cherednik algebras and Drinfeld doubles

2.0 Oren Ben-Bassat: Analytic geometry as relative algebraic geometry I

3.30 Kobi Kremnizer: Analytic geometry as relative algebraic geometry II

Tuesday 8 October room L6, basement, (new) Mathematical Institute

9.30 Vittoria Bussi: A Darboux theorem for shifted symplectic derived schemes, and applications to motivic Milnor fibres

11.0 Dominic Joyce: D-critical loci; categorification of Donaldson-Thomas theory using perverse sheaves; future projects

2.0 Balazs Szendroi: Localization of critical cohomology

3.45  Yan Ting Lam: Calabi-Yau categories from graded quivers with superpotential

Wednesday 9 October room L4, basement, (new) Mathematical Institute

9.45 Dennis Borisov: Virtual cycles for Calabi-Yau 4-fold moduli spaces

11.15 Dario Beraldo: Loop group actions on categories and Langlands duality

View from my window.

First Post

Hello world. We are entering an age where the distinction between human, computer and internet is fading away. In an effort to fully participate in the new global consciousness or 'being' which is forming, we will publish in this blog various thoughts on mathematics and perhaps more. Although much of what we say may be incomprehensible to non-mathematicians, we may try here and there to communicate something about the experience of mathematics, and maybe a little about the objects we try to understand. Pictures from around the world will also be posted (including pictures from various mathematical conferences). Oren Ben-Bassat, Jan. 2, 2014, Tel Aviv.