ABSTRACT: Groebner bases are a general purpose method in symbolic
computation. Recent engineering applications include geometric
modeling, stochastic processes, systems theory, and error-correcting
codes. This talk gives an elementary introduction to Groebner bases,
by illustrating their use in algorithms for three particular tasks:
integer programming, numerical solution of systems of algebraic
equations, and symbolic analysis of linear partial differential
equations with polynomial coefficients.

BIOGRAPHY: Bernd Sturmfels received his doctoral degree in 1987 from
the University of Washington, Seattle. After spending postdoctoral
years at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications,
Minneapolis, and the Research Institute for Symbolic Computation,
Linz, Austria, he taught Mathematics and Operations Research at
Cornell University, before joining UC Berkeley in 1995. A leading
experimentalist among mathematicians, he has authored six books and
over 100 articles, with an emphasis on algebraic and geometric
algorithms and their applications.