YRM 2015 is coming to Oxford!

Following an enormously successful YRM at the University of Warwick last week, we are pleased to announce that YRM 2015 will be held at the University of Oxford, in the new Andrew Wiles building.

Launched at the University of Cambridge in 2009, Young Researchers in Mathematics (YRM) is an annual conference for doctoral and post-doctoral students in the UK. There are streams of talks covering almost all areas of research mathematics, and, in this and previous years, the conference has attracted large numbers of students from all across the UK and several parts of Europe. It offers the opportunity for all participants to speak, as well as featuring plenary speakers and keynote talks from leading mathematicians in each of the main streams.

YRM 2015 will be held Monday-Thursday of the week beginning 17th August 2015. Please share this with research students at your university, in order that they may save the date!

I am currently at an exciting conference organized by Ivan Fesenko together with Kobi Kremnizer and Boris Zilber. My hat goes of to Ivan Fesenko for bringing together such an esteemed group of his colleagues and other mathematicians for this amazing conference. See more about it on Ivan's homepage at https://www.maths.nottingham.ac.uk/personal/ibf/files/sc3.html. I am also happy to see many familiar faces from Gaitsgory's epic conference in Jerusalem on the Geometric Langlands conjectures. Unfortunately, this past few months have been so busy that I have not been able to record my perceptions on that amazing conference in blog form. Here is a link to that: https://sites.google.com/site/geometriclanglands2014/.

I recently had the chance to speak at a small, intimate conference organized by Francesco Baldassarri at the university of Padova alongside the thesis defence of Federico Bambozzi. Here is the list of topics from the Padova conference: http://docenti.math.unipd.it/geometria/node/10/.

Padova

                                                             where Galileo lectured

where the lectures of the conference are held

the courtyard of the mathematics building

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.