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September 10, 2013

CRM (Centre de Recherches Mathématiques, Montreal) Thematic Semester “New Directions in Lie Theory

Posted by Alexander Hoffnung

Much like folks around here, Alistair Savage has been thinking about categorification for some time now and has together with Erhard Neher announced an upcoming opportunity for graduate students and postdocs to take part in a winter school as part of the CRM (Centre de Recherches Math`ematiques, Montreal) Thematic Semester “New Directions in Lie Theory” from January to June 2014.

The first winter school will take place January 6-17, 2014 and will feature two courses:

Introduction to categorification, taught by Alistair Savage
Introduction to Kac-Moody and related Lie algebras, taught by Erhard Neher

Further information can be found at: http://www.crm.umontreal.ca/2014/Catego14/index_e.php.

It is worth following the above link as Alistair has begun to post some information as well as his reference materials, which may be of interest so I will repost here

  • Alexander Kleshchev, Linear and projective representations of symmetric groups, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
  • Volodymyr Mazorchuk, Lectures on algebraic categorification, European Mathematical Society, 2012.
  • Wei Lu and Aaron McBride, Algebraic structures on Grothendieck groups, 2013.

There is funding available for graduate students and postdocs to attend the winter school. Applications for funding can be submitted online at the above website. The deadline is October 1, 2013.

Information on the thematic semester (including the second winter school) can be found at http://www.crm.math.ca/LieTheory2014/.

Please pass this information on to students and postdocs and anyone else that you think might be interested.

On a related note, I attended an Neher-Savage summer school on Geometric Representation Theory and Extended Affine Lie Algebras a few years back as a graduate student. Just like the upcoming school, this summer school had a number of interesting short courses. The lineup was:

  • Introduction to geometric representation theory, Joel Kamnitzer
  • Introduction to quantum groups and crystals, Seok-Jin Kang
  • Affine, toroidal and extended affine Lie algebras, Erhard Neher
  • Nilpotent orbits and W algebras, Weiqiang Wang
  • Geometric realizations of crystals, Alistair Savage
  • Representation theory of affine and toroidal Lie algebras, Vyjayanthi Chari

The next year I went to the University of Ottawa as a postdoc. Alistair and I coauthored an article together with Jose Malagon-Lopez and Kirill Zainoulline called Formal Hecke algebras and algebraic oriented cohomology theories. This project arose, in part, from discussions on categorification, geometric representation theory, and algebraic cobordism, and takes an interesting combinatorial/algebraic approach to the study of geometric constructions which one might expect to encounter in categorification. We haven’t discussed this work here in any detail yet, but hopefully we will have a chance in the near future!

Posted at September 10, 2013 6:27 PM UTC

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