This is a fairly recent picture of the McGill campus:
However, soon the spell of unbearable heat will dawn on the city and there will be plenty of fun things to do outside. Despite the hot sun we shouldn’t neglect the indoor activities, such as the many awesome conferences and workshops that will be going on. This post is a list of a few of them that I think would be interesting to people who like algebra and number theory. They are listed in chronological order.
Montreal-Toronto Workshop in Number Theory: p-divisible groups
- Dates: April 17-April 19, 2013
- Location: CRM (Université de Montréal)
- Activities: Lectures starting with a basic overview to some recent developments
- Topics: (tentative) Diedonne modules, classification of p-divisible groups, Grothendieck-Messing theory; Serre-Tate theorem, displays, Kisin modules, stratification of moduli spaces
- Website: Not available, but see the official list of conferences
- Cost: Unknown, but it’s usually free with a small fee for the dinner
Why it will be cool: this workshop is on an important topic and it will be accessible to graduate students!
GAP 2013: Geometry And Physics
- Dates: May 30-June 1, 2013
- Location: CRM (Université de Montréal)
- Activities: Minicourses
- Topics: Wall-crossings, integrable systems, Donaldson-Thomas invariants, cluster algebras, hyperKähler metrics, quadratic differentials and spectral networks
- Cost: $45 CDN
Why it will be cool: one topic in particular concerns putting stability conditions on triangulated categories that generalise some properties of Harder-Narasimhan filtrations on the bounded derived category of coherent sheaves on a smooth algebraic variety. This abstraction can now be studied purely in the setting of triangulated categories, which should be interesting for those interested in homological algebra and mirror symmetry, where the counting of stable objects seems to be pretty useful.
Another interesting thing that will appear is the hyperKähler metric on the moduli stack of Higgs bundles. Although this is again supposedly something that will help mirror symmetry, it should also be interesting for those studying the space of Hitchin pairs and the Hitchin fibration, a key geometric object in Ngo’s proof of the fundamental lemma. And after a one-day vacation, we have:
Thematic Program on Rational Points, Rational Curves and Entire Holomorphic Curves on Algebraic Varieties
- Dates: June 3-June 28, 2013
- Location: CRM (Université de Montréal)
- Activities: Three weeks of minicourses, one week of recent developments, poster session
- Topics: No further official details, but see the list of speakers for the minicourses for obvious hints
- Cost: Unknown
Why it will be cool: There are twelve confirmed awesome speakers for minicourses so there will definitely be something to learn for anyone in related fields. There aren’t many details for this one yet!
