Terry Wall Lecture 8th November 2019
The 2019 Terry Wall Lecture will take place on 8th November at 16:30 in the Rotblat Lecture Theatre.
The speaker is Professor Caucher Birkar from the University of Cambridge.
Caucher Birkar is a Professor at the University of Cambridge. He grew up on a subsistence farm in the Kurdistan province of Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, and relocated to the UK as a refugee in 2000. In 2004 he received his PhD from Nottingham University. He has made fundamental contributions to birational geometry and the minimal model program. Among many honors, he was awarded the 2010 Leverhulme Prize in mathematics and statistics for "his outstanding contributions to fundamental research in algebraic geometry", the 2010 Prize of the Fondation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris, the 2016 AMS Moore Prize, and became a fellow of the Royal Society in 2019. In 2018 he received the Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics, "for the proof of the boundedness of Fano varieties and for contributions to the minimal model program".
The lecture is entitled "Alegebra vs Geometry".
Abstract: The fields of algebra and geometry interact in numerous ways. This has a long history going back to thousands of years ago. In this talk I will discuss some of those interactions with a particular emphasis on algebraic geometry.
The lecture is aimed at a broad scientific audience and undergraduate students are particularly welcome.
Refreshments are available outside the lecture theatre from 16:00 and there will be a wine and nibbles reception following the lecture.