Houston Kirk Lecture: A Survey of Free Resolutions

Abstract: Free resolutions are a refinement of the idea of specifying a system such as an abelian group by generators and relations. They first appeared in the work of Arthur Cayley on elimination theory around 1850, and were used by David Hilbert in his landmark work on invariant theory. Since then they have become a staple of commutative algebra, algebraic geometry, and representation theory.

I'll survey some of what we now know about free resolutions, and explain some of the open problems that are a focus of current work.

Host: Roya Beheshti

Reception to follow at Cupples I, Room 200 (Lounge) from 2:00 - 3:00 pm.