University of Georgia
Department of Mathematics

Seminar Schedule
August 16 - August 20, 2003

All Seminars are held in BOYD Graduate Studies Bldg. unless otherwise noted.

MONDAY, August 16, 2004

Algebra Seminar
2:00-3:00pm, Room 410
Speaker: Donna Testerman, from Lausanne, Switzerland,
Title of talk: TBA

3:00-4:00pm
Speaker: Dave Hemmer
Title of talk: TBA

TUESDAY, August 17, 2004

VIGRE
2:00p.m., Room 322
Speaker: Elham Izadi, University of Georgia
Title of talk: Sheaves and quivers
Abstract: Recently, motivated and inspired by developments in Physics   (string theory), there has been a lot of interest in the derived  categories of coherent sheaves of algebraic varieties. Some recent  breakthroughs include the facts that in some cases, a variety can be  determined by its derived category, in other cases, this is far from  being true. This is currently an extremely active and important area of  research. In this VIGRE group our aim will be to gain a working  knowledge of derived categories by computing them for concrete  examples. For instance, the derived categories of Del Pezzo surfaces  have beautiful and simple descriptions. We will attempt to generalize  some of these descriptions to new cases of varieties.

THURSDAY, August 19, 2004

VIGRE 
2:00p.m., Room 304
Speaker: Dino Lorenzini, University of Georgia
Title of talk: Rational points on curves
Abstract: A more down-to-earth version of the topic would be:  Given a  polynomial f(x,y) with rational coefficients, what can be said about  the points (x,y) with rational coordinates x and y such
 that f(x,y)=0.  I will give a short survey of this subject.

Colloquium
3:30p.m., Room 304
Speaker: Donna Testerman, from the EPFL, Lausanne Switzerland
Title of talk: Overgroups of unipotent elements in reductive algebraic groups
Abstract: We motivate the study of overgroups of unipotent elements by sketching a key part of the proof of Serre's tensor product theorem, concerning the complete reducibility of group representations.

After this general introduction, we restrict our attention to simple algebraic groups and consider various questions concerning the existence, uniqueness and properties of connected overgroups of unipotent elements.