This grant will enable young mathematicians -- graduate students, post-doctoral candidates, and junior faculty members -- to attend and participate in satellite conferences held in conjunction with the Mittag-Leffler Institute's 2011 program ``Algebraic geometry with a view towards applications." The satellite conferences will take place in Oslo, Norway and Stockholm, Sweden, and the organization and venues will permit ample time for young researchers to meet, interact, and share mathematical ideas in an international setting. The focus of the conferences include applications of algebraic geometry in the sciences, solving polynomial equations, and algorithm development.
Although algebraic geometry has traditionally been considered a core area of pure mathematics, in recent years its techniques have been utilized to advance methods in applied mathematics. For example, algebraic geometric techniques have been used to prove identifiability results for parameters in statistical models which are parameterized by polynomials. In other areas also -- biology, coding theory, cryptology, quantum computing, machine learning, and optimization for example -- valuable contributions have been made recently by researchers employing methods from algebraic geometry.
This grant allowed a total of 25 young mathematical researchers to attend week-long satellite conferences in Scandinavia as part of the Mittag Leffler Institute's spring 2011 research program `Algebraic Geometry with a View towards Applications.' Of these 25 people, one has a bachelor's degree, 12 are graduate students, 6 are post-doctoral candidates, and 6 are junior faculty. The three conferences took place in Oslo, Norway (Jan 2011), Stockholm, Sweden (Feb 2011), and Stockholm, Sweden (May 2011). At these conferences, the young researchers gave talks, presented posters on their research and interacted actively with other attendees. This was an exceptional opportunity to develop human resources, in that it is in the national interest to train and mentor burgeoning talent in mathematics and science. A broader impact of this grant was the opportunity for these young researchers to interact with researchers from all over the world, and in particular to meet and exchange ideas with young Scandinavian graduate students and post-docs. Such meetings help foster international scientific collaborations. Several meeting attendees reported that new mathematical research results will come out of work that was begun at these conferences. Such collaborative work advances the research area in which tools from algebraic geometry are used in the applied sciences.
