2014-2015 Clifford Lectures

Algebraic Groups: Structure and Actions | March 2 - 5, 2015

Since 1984 the Mathematics Department at Tulane University has held the annual Clifford Lectures, a week-long series of talks by a distinguished mathematician.  A mini-conference is held in conjunction with each of the Clifford Lecture series.

This year's Clifford Lecturer:  Michel Brion (University of Grenoble)

Algebraic groups form a very active research area in contemporary mathematics.  It has rich relations to many other areas, including algebraic geometry, number theory, and representation theory.  The structure of algebraic groups over arbitrary fields has been studied in depth by Rosenlicht, Chevalley, Borel and Tits, but it is only in recent work of Conrad, Gabber and Prasad that the situation became well-understood in full generality.  Further advances concern the geometry of homogeneous varieties and their generalizations, and the structure of (birational) automorphism groups of algebraic varieties.  The lectures and conference will present an overview of these recent developments, aimed at a broad audience.

Invited speakers include:

David Anderson (The Ohio State University)

Jérémy Blanc (University of Basel)

Brian Conrad (Stanford University)

Alexander Merkurjev (University of California Los Angeles)

Gopal Prasad (University of Michigan)

Zinovy Reichstein (University of British Columbia)