Londom Mathematical Society
in association with the COW Algebraic Geometry Seminar

Spitalfields day: Aspects of geometry

Lecture room L2, Mathematical Institute, Oxford

Wednesday 27 September 2006

2pm-3pm David Mumford (Brown): Metrics on the space of simple closed plane curves

Motivated by applications to computer vision, several groups have been studying the differential geometry of the infinite dimensional manifold of simple closed plane curves. Unexpectedly, there are (at least) three quite different methods for defining Riemannian metrics on this space, with very different properties. I will report on this "work in progress".

3pm-3.45pm Tea

3.45pm-4.45pm Bernd Sturmfels (UC Berkeley): Tropical Implicitization

Implicitization is the computational problem of finding the equations which vanish on the image of a polynomial map. We present a new polyhedral approach to this problem, which is based on tropical algebraic geometry. This involves resolving the problem that morphisms do not commute with tropicalization. This is joint work with Jenia Tevelev and Josephine Yu.

5pm-6pm Wine and cheese reception

The talks are aimed at graduate students and researchers interested in geometry, understood in a wide sense, as applied to problems such as image recognition and other aspects of computation. Anyone interested is welcome to attend; please let Balazs Szendroi know if you intend to come. There are limited funds available to assist students to attend; please apply by 15 September.