LivMS Lecture

Presenter: Caucher Birkar

Title: Algebra vs Geometry

Audience: Sixth form, undergraduate and general

Venue: Rotblat Lecture Theatre, University of Liverpool

Contact: Alice Rizzardo

This is a lecture aimed at undergraduate students, and this year’s speaker is Prof. Caucher Birkar, who just won the Fields Medal last year – this is the highest honor in mathematics, similar to the Nobel Prize in other fields. The lecture should be of interest also to sixth form students and all those interested in algebra or geometry.

Abstract: The fields of algebra and geometry interact in numerous ways. This has a long history going back to thousands of years ago. In this talk I will discuss some of those interactions with a particular emphasis on algebraic geometry.

Caucher Birkar is a professor at the University of Cambridge. He grew up on a subsistence farm in the Kurdistan province of Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, and relocated to the UK as a refugee in 2000. In 2004 he received his PhD from Nottingham University. He has made fundamental contributions to birational geometry and the minimal model program. Among many honors, he was awarded the 2010 Leverhulme Prize in mathematics and statistics for “his outstanding contributions to fundamental research in algebraic geometry”, the 2010 Prize of the Fondation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris, the 2016 AMS Moore Prize, and became a fellow of the Royal Society in 2019. In 2018 he received the Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics, “for the proof of the boundedness of Fano varieties and for contributions to the minimal model program”.