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Current Events Bulletin

Introduction to the Current Events Bulletin

Will the Riemann Hypothesis be proved this week? What is the Geometric Langlands Conjecture about? How could you best exploit a stream of data flowing by too fast to capture? I love the idea of having an expert explain such things to me in a brief, accessible way. I think we mathematicians are provoked to ask such questions by our sense that underneath the vastness of mathematics is a fundamental unity allowing us to look into many different corners -- though we couldn't possibly work in all of them. And I, like most of us, love common-room gossip.

The Current Events Bulletin Session at the Joint Mathematics Meetings, begun in 2003, is an event where the speakers do not report on their own work, but survey some of the most interesting current developments in mathematics, pure and applied. The wonderful tradition of the Bourbaki Seminar is an inspiration, but we aim for more accessible treatments and a wider range of subjects. I've been the organizer of these sessions since they started, but a broadly constituted advisory committee helps select the topics and speakers. Excellence in exposition is a prime consideration.

A written exposition greatly increases the number of people who can enjoy the product of the sessions, so speakers are asked to do the hard work of producing such articles. These are made into a booklet distributed at the meeting. Speakers are then invited to submit papers based on them to the Bulletin of the AMS, and this has led to many fine publications.

I hope you'll enjoy the papers produced from these sessions, but there's nothing like being at the talks -- don't miss them!

David Eisenbud, Organizer
University of California, Berkeley
de@msri.org

 

Sessions, Speakers, Booklets and Bulletin of the AMS Papers

January 8, 2008 (San Diego, California)  (booklet produced for meetingThis is a PDF
            document 2.7 MB)

Günther Uhlmann
University of Washington
Invisibility

Antonella Grassi
University of Pennsylvania
Birational Geometry: Old and New 

Gregory F. Lawler
University of Chicago
Conformal Invariance and 2-d Statistical Physics

Terence C. Tao
University of California, Los Angeles
Why are Solitons Stable?

January 7, 2007 (New Orleans, Louisiana) (booklet produced for meetingThis is a PDF
            document 2.8 MB)
Robert Ghrist
University of Illinois
Barcodes: The Persistent Topology of Data
http://www.ams.org/bull/2008-45-01/S0273-0979-07-01191-3/

Akshay Venkatesh
Courant Institute, New York University
Flows on the Space of Lattices: work of Einsiedler, Katok and Lindenstrauss
http://www.ams.org/bull/2008-45-01/S0273-0979-07-01194-9/
 

Izabella Laba
University of British Columbia
From Harmonic Analysis to Arithmetic Combinatorics
http://www.ams.org/bull/2008-45-01/S0273-0979-07-01189-5/

Barry Mazur
Harvard University
The Structure of Error Terms in Number-Theory
and an Introduction to the Sato-Tate Conjecture
http://www.ams.org/bull/2008-45-02/S0273-0979-08-01207-X/home.html

January 14, 2006 (San Antonio, Texas) (booklet produced for meetingThis is a PDF
            document 2.4 MB)
Lauren Ancel Myers
University of Texas at Austin
Contact network epidemiology:; Bond percolation applied to infectious disease prediction and control
http://www.ams.org/bull/2007-44-01/S0273-0979-06-01148-7/home.html

Kannan Soundararajan
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Small gaps between prime numbers
http://www.ams.org/bull/2007-44-01/S0273-0979-06-01142-6/home.html;

Madhu Sudan
MIT
Probabilistically checkable proofs
http://www.ams.org/bull/2007-44-01/S0273-0979-06-01143-8/home.html

Martin Golubitsky
University of Houston
Symmetry in neuroscience

January 7, 2005 (Atlanta, Georgia) (booklet produced for meetingThis is a PDF
            document 3 MB)
Bryna Kra
Northwestern University
The Green-Tao Theorem on primes in arithmetic progression:; A dynamical point of view
http://www.ams.org/bull/2006-43-01/S0273-0979-05-01086-4/home.html

Robert McEliece
California Institute of Technology
Achieving the Shannon Limit:; A progress report

Dusa McDuff
SUNY at Stony Brook
Floer theory and low dimensional topology
http://www.ams.org/bull/2006-43-01/S0273-0979-05-01080-3/home.html

Jerrold Marsden and Shane Ross
California Institute of Technology
New methods in celestial mechanics and mission design
http://www.ams.org/bull/2006-43-01/S0273-0979-05-01085-2/home.html

László Lovász
Microsoft Corporation
Graph minors and the proof of Wagner's conjecture
http://www.ams.org/bull/2006-43-01/S0273-0979-05-01088-8/home.html

January 9, 2004 (Phoenix, Arizona) (booklet produced for meetingThis is a PDF
            document 1.1 MB)
Margaret H. Wright
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University
The interior-point revolution in optimization:; History, recent developments and lasting consequences
http://www.ams.org/bull/2005-42-01/S0273-0979-04-01040-7/home.html

Thomas C. Hales
University of Pittsburgh
What is motivic integration?
http://www.ams.org/bull/2005-42-02/S0273-0979-05-01053-0/home.html

Andrew Granville
Université de Montréal
It is easy to determine whether or not a given integer is prime
http://www.ams.org/bull/2005-42-01/S0273-0979-04-01037-7/home.html

John W. Morgan
Columbia University
Perelman's recent work on the classification of 3-manifolds
http://www.ams.org/bull/2005-42-01/S0273-0979-04-01045-6/home.html

January 17, 2003 (Baltimore, Maryland) (no booklet produced for meeting)
Michael J. Hopkins
MIT
Homotopy theory of schemes

Ingrid Daubechies
Princeton University
Sublinear algorithms for sparse approximations with excellent odds

Edward Frenkel
University of California, Berkeley
Recent advances in the Langlands Program
http://www.ams.org/bull/2004-41-02/S0273-0979-04-01001-8/home.html

Daniel Tataru
University of California, Berkeley
The wave maps equation
http://www.ams.org/bull/2004-41-02/S0273-0979-04-01005-5/home.html