UW Student Algebraic Geometry Seminar

This is the current homepage of the UW Student Algebraic Geometry Seminar. The seminar will usually* be held at 3:00PM in PDL C-401 on Thursdays during the Spring 2025 quarter. 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.


April 3	Andrew Tawfeek The quest towards a tropical Brill-Noether Theorem We will open with a discussion of the Brill-Noether Theorem, a statement concerning the topology of the Brill-Noether locus: the collection line bundles of degree $d$ and rank $r$ over a variety $X$ . We then shift to discussing its conjectural tropical formulation and a recent attempt to attack the problem by mimicking the classical proof: developing a tropical Porteous formula and applying it to an analogue of the Poincaré bundle. This talk is largely based on the work of arXiv 2411.10578.
April 11*	Jarod Alper The Picard group of the moduli of vector bundles on a curve We will revisit Drezet and Narasimhan’s computation from the 80s.
April 17	Soham Ghosh On the Casas-Alvero conjecture Around 2001, motivated by his work on singularities, Casas-Alvero conjectured the following: If a monic univariate polynomial $f (X)$ of degree $n$ , over a field of characteristic $0$ , has a non-trivial gcd with each of its formal derivatives $f^{(i)} (X)$ for $1 \leq i \leq n - 1$ , then $f (X)$ is a pure power of a monic linear polynomial. In this talk, we will show that over any field of characteristic $p > 0$ , there are “finitely many” counter-examples to the conjecture, and also sketch a proof of the conjecture over characteristic $0$ . As a corollary, we will also obtain a new proof of the fact that rational normal curves are set-theoretic complete intersections (in characteristic $0$ ). Based on the preprints arxiv: 2402.18717 and arxiv:2501.09272.
April 24	Giovanni Inchiostro TBA TBA
May 1	Sándor Kovács TBA TBA
May 8	Tyson Klingner TBA TBA
May 15	Arkamouli Debnath TBA TBA
May 22	Jackson Morris TBA TBA
May 29	Haoming Ning TBA TBA
June 5	Michael Zeng TBA TBA

The seminar was founded in Fall 2023 by Arkamouli Debnath, who also organized it through Fall 2024. Since January 2025, it has been organized by Daniel Rostamloo.

Previous seminars

Winter 2025, Fall 2024, Fall/Spring 2023