MIT STAGE: Seminar on Topics in Arithmetic, Geometry, Etc.

MIT STAGE (Seminar on Topics in Arithmetic, Geometry, Etc.)
Fall 2005: Wednesday 2-3, Harvard Science Center 507

This is the home page of STAGE, the Seminar on Topics in Arithmetic, Geometry, Etc. The seminar meets Wednesday at 2 in Science Center 507 at Harvard. To get on (or off) the seminar mailing list, contact me (Kiran Kedlaya).

News

The page is not yet updated for the spring semester, but a bit of early news: for various reasons, I decided to unilaterally schedule STAGE this semester. It will be Fridays 10-11, in a room at MIT to be determined.

The Clay Math Institute is sponsoring a summer school in 2006 on arithmetic geometry, and there will be some funding for graduate students to attend. For details, see here.

The theme for STAGE for this semester will be "Witt vectors". In particular, I'm hoping to study the de Rham-Witt complex as introduced by Deligne-Illusie and further studied by Langer-Zink, Hesselholt, et al. However, as always, the theme is really just a starting point; I'm happy to hear about just about anything arithmetic that someone wants to talk about.

The working group on Berkovich's paper Etale cohomology for non-archimedean analytic spaces (available online at NUMDAM) may also continue, but it may be a bit hard to jump into it partway through (we went through much of the first three chapters last term). In any case, if you want to be on the separate mailing list for that, let me know.

Schedule

Note that Monday meetings are 3-4 PM at MIT, in room 36-155.

Date	Speaker	Topic
Sep. 6 (Tue)	any and all	Organizational meeting
Sep. 21 (Wed)	Kiran Kedlaya	Witt vectors, big and small
Sep. 28 (Wed)	NO MEETING	(KSK away)
Oct. 5 (Wed)	Ruochuan Liu	Fontaine's rings
Oct. 12 (Wed)	Christian Kappen	Congruences for Neron models of tori (notes)
Oct. 19 (Wed)	NO MEETING	(KSK away)
Oct. 26 (Wed)	Josh Nichols-Barrer	Crystalline non-abelian Hodge theory
Nov. 2 (Wed)	Lars Hesselholt	The absolute de Rham-Witt complex and p-adic vanishing cycles
Nov. 9 (Wed)	NO MEETING	(KSK away)
Nov. 14 (Monday)	Jay Pottharst	p-adic cohomology of abelian varieties
Nov. 21 (Monday)	Ruochuan Liu	More Fontaine's rings
Nov. 30 (Wed)	Jesse Kass	Classification of rational Dieudonné modules
Dec. 7 (Wed)	Kiran Kedlaya	The splitting principle for big Witt vectors (notes of Hesselholt and Lenstra)
Dec. 12 (Monday)	Ruochuan Liu	Even more Fontaine's rings

Other local seminars

The Baby Algebraic Geometry Seminar (BAGS) is an MIT graduate seminar in algebraic geometry (not as arithmetically oriented as STAGE); I don't know yet where its home page will be next semester.
The Boston University algebra seminar is in fact a (research-level) number theory seminar by another name. (The easiest way to the BU math department is probably to walk. Allow 25-30 minutes.)
BU also has had a student seminar in number theory and algebraic geometry; I expect this will happen again in future.
The Harvard number theory seminar does not have a separate home page; you can see upcoming talks listed on the math department seminar listing. (Take the red line from Kendall or the #1 bus from 77 Mass. Ave., in which case allow 20 minutes. Or walk up Mass. Ave., in which case allow 35 minutes.)
At any given moment, there are typically several informal graduate seminars in existence at Harvard, but they're so informal as to ordinarily not have web pages.
The Brandeis Fellowship of the Ring is an algebra seminar which includes some number theory. Unfortunately it's a bit hard to get to from here without driving.

Miscellanea

Check out the web page for the McGill seminar on cohomology theories from the 2003-2004 academic year. They have some notes posted which may be of interest.

I'm collecting a list of references for topics that come up in the seminar (see also the McGill page), and a list of potential topics. (The latter is not to be confused with "topics not yet scheduled", which are the ones I am actively looking to include.) Beware that these have not yet been updated from last semester, but they're still useful.

Some information about the seminar (some of which is now dated) is contained in the introductory email that I sent out to the mailing list on December 23, 2003, and the followup email that I sent on January 6, 2004.

This page is maintained by Kiran Kedlaya; it was shamelessly copied from Jason Starr's page, which in turn was shamelessly copied from Ravi Vakil's page, which in turn was shamelessly copied from Pasha Belorousski's page at the University of Michigan. For more sites with a similar pedigree, see Michael Thaddeus's list or Jim Bryan's list.