UW Student Algebraic Geometry Seminar

This is the current homepage of the UW Student Algebraic Geometry Seminar. The seminar will be held on Thursdays at 3:00PM in PDL C-401 during the Winter 2025 quarter. The goal of the seminar is to foster engagement with modern research in algebraic geometry (broadly interpreted) and provide a forum for graduate students to present and discuss aspects of their work and readings. The seminar will also feature some talks by faculty in the department. If you would like to give a talk or have any questions, please contact Daniel Rostamloo (rostam[at]uw[dot]edu).

Talks for the Winter 2025 Quarter

Click on a title to reveal the corresponding abstract. Titles and abstracts may appear first on the math department calendar.


January 16	Burt Totaro Endomorphisms of varieties A natural class of dynamical systems is obtained by iterating polynomial maps, which can be viewed as maps from projective space to itself. One can ask which other projective varieties admit endomorphisms of degree greater than 1. This seems to be an extremely restrictive property, with all known examples coming from toric varieties (such as projective space) or abelian varieties. We describe what is known in this direction, with the new ingredient being the “Bott vanishing” property. Joint work with Tatsuro Kawakami.
January 23	Arkamouli Debnath Derived Category of GIT Quotient Geometric Invariant Theory (GIT) is the theory of defining quotients in Algebraic Geometry. In his paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.0276 (The Derived Category of a GIT quotient) Halpern-Leistner sets up a way of thinking about the derived category of a GIT quotient and in particular gives a semiorthogonal decomposition of the derived category of $[X/G]$ where one of the components is the derived category of $[X^{ss}/G]$ where $G$ is a reductive group, $X$ is a variety and $X^{ss}$ is the GIT semistable locus. In this talk I will start with a short introduction to GIT and try to give a roadmap to how we get such a semiorthogonal decomposition. It will involve the idea of what are called “window categories” which are extremely important tools being used in this area recently.
January 30	Farbod Shokrieh Heights and Berkovich/tropical spaces I will discuss some connections between the theory of heights on abelian varieties and Berkovich analytic spaces. For example, some refinements and generalizations of classical results of Néron and of Tate will be presented, where “skeleta” of Berkovich spaces (viewed as “tropical” spaces) play a central role.
February 6	Bianca Viray TBA
February 13	Sándor Kovács TBA
February 20	Ting Gong TBA
February 27	Justin Bloom TBA
March 6	Julia Pevtsova TBA
March 13	Daniel Rostamloo TBA

The seminar was founded in Fall 2023 by Arkamouli Debnath, who also organized it through Fall 2024. The old seminar homepage can be found here. Starting in January 2025, it will be organized by Daniel Rostamloo.