Rigorous Trivialities

Today, rather than posting in my Algebraic Geometry from the Beginning series, I’m just going to do a quick post on a few things that are going on mathematically. First off, by clicking through Kung Fu Physics’s Super Holiday Post because it linked here, I found the Academic Reader. It’s more aimed at physics than math, but it still seems nifty, and looks like it might be a bit more suited to my paper organizing and reading needs than Google Reader (which I do make massive use of).

On the topic of papers, I’m about to start reading a couple of papers about Non-Reductive Geometric Invariant Theory. One of them popped up on the Arxiv today, on Quotients by non-reductive algebraic group actions by Kirwan. Fortunately, the abstract has a link to an older paper, Towards non-reductive geometric invariant theory by Doran and Kirwan last year. I’m excited about these because I’m organizing the Graduate Student Algebra Seminar here at Penn this semester, and we decided that our topic was going to be algebraic groups and invariant theory. I’m giving a couple of the early talks focusing on invariants of finite groups, and I’ll probably post my talks here after I give them.

Additionally, I’m about to start reading Meet homological mirror symmetry by Ballard because I’ve been wanting to figure out what this stuff is, and I think now I’m getting to the place where I have a chance at understanding it, being in my second semester of Complex Algebraic Geometry, which is focusing on open problems (Geometric Langlands, Hodge Conjecture, and Mirror Symmetry seem to be the ones we’re focusing on), I’m studying Hartshorne and doing the problems in it whenever I have spare time to prep for my orals in the Fall, and I’m doing a reading course on Deformation Theory, starting with Manetti’s Lectures on Deformations of Complex Manifolds. Overall, I’ve got quite a semester in front of me, and I’ll keep updating here, well…whenever it crosses my mind or whenever I want to post but don’t feel like doing anything technical.