Old News

On November 6-7, 2017, we will organize a Workshop at TU Berlin on the topic "Algebra meets numerics: condition and complexity".

We are very pleased to announce that Avi Wigderson will deliver three lectures:

• Operator Scaling - Theory and Applications, TU Berlin, June 28, 16¹⁵-18⁰⁰, MA 004
• Structural and Computational Aspects of Brascamp-Lieb Inequalities, TU Berlin, June 29, 16¹⁵-18⁰⁰, MA 004
• Randomness, BMS Friday Colloquium [poster], June 30, 14¹⁵-15⁴⁵, BMS Loft Urania

See the announcement for details and abstracts.

Technische Universität Berlin, Fakultät II - Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften, calls for applications for an assistant professorship Algorithmic Algebra (Level W1) at the Institute of Mathematics. (Position ID: II-450/16, starting date: as soon as possible). Details for this opening are available here.

The BMS will welcome Prof. Felipe Cucker from City University Hong Kong as the new Einstein Visiting Fellow in January 2017. Cucker will set up his research group at TU Berlin while continuing his professorship at City University. One postdoc position and two PhD scholarships will be offered within Cucker's Einstein Visiting Fellowship "Complexity and accuracy of numerical algorithms in algebra and geometry" for the period 1 January 2017 to 31 December 2019. More details and information on how to apply can be found here.

Valiant's algebraic version of the P vs. NP problem (VP vs. VNP) cannot be resolved by exhibiting representation-theoretic occurrence obstructions in the sense of Mulmuley and Sohoni. This has been recently shown by Peter Bürgisser in collaboration with Christian Ikenmeyer and Greta Panova, see [arXiv:1604.06431]. The paper has been accepted for publication in FOCS 2016.

Pierre Lairez has completely solved the 17th problem in Smale's list of mathematical problems for the next century. The result can be found here. The paper has been accepted for publication in J.FOCM.

In the Siam News article Geometry, Invariants, and the Search for Elusive Complexity Lower Bounds, Jan Draisma gives an overview of the current state of affairs in geometric complexity theory. This article is losely based on the Simons Institute Open Lecture by Prof. Peter Bürgisser on this topic.

In January 2015, Peter Bürgisser was appointed editor in chief of the Journal Computational Complexity, published by Birkhäuser.

The new publication "Permanent versus determinant: not via saturations of monoids of representations" is now available as a preprint.

The new paper "A stable, polynomial-time algorithm for the eigenpair problem" is now available on the arXiv.

Bernd Sturmfels was awarded an Einstein Visiting Fellowship, starting in 2015. This will involve setting up a research group at TU Berlin, with one postdoc and one PhD student. Outstanding candidates are invited to indicate their interest with an e-mail to bernd@berkeley.edu and apply officially to the BMS.

In the winter term of 2014/15, Prof. Dr. Bürgisser will spend one sabatical term at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, Berkeley. He is organizer of the program Algorithms and Complexity in Algebraic Geometry. In particular, Prof. Bürgisser will come back to TU Berlin only as early as summer 2015. Until then, there will be no office hours. The newly appointed professor Martin Henk will be teaching the course "Algebra 1" in the winter term. The contents of this course will be roughly the same as those of the course with the same name from the previous term.