Spring 2023 Horizons Lectures

Associate Professor Melody Chan of Brown University will provide the Spring 2023 Horizons Lectures

Melody Chan is an American mathematician working in combinatorial algebraic geometry. She was an undergraduate at Yale and, after spending time at Cambridge and Princeton, received her Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in 2012. She was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard until 2015, and since then has been at Brown University, where she is currently an Associate Professor of Mathematics. She received a 2018 Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER grant, the 2020 AWM-Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra, and a 2023 Simons Fellowship. In 2022, she was elected as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Department Colloquium

Wednesday, April 26, 2023

Fine Hall 314 / 4:30 PM — 5:30 PM

Moduli Spaces in Tropical Geometry 

I will give a hopefully accessible introduction to some work on tropical moduli spaces of curves and abelian varieties. I will report on joint work with Madeline Brandt, Juliette Bruce, Margarida Melo, Gwyneth Moreland, and Corey Wolfe, in which we find new rational cohomology classes in the moduli space A_g of abelian varieties using tropical techniques. And I will try to touch on a new point of view on this topic, namely that of differential forms on tropical moduli spaces, following the work of Francis Brown.

Horizons Seminar

Thursday, April 27, 2023

Lewis Library 120  / 7: 00 PM — 8:00 PM

Queerness in Mathematics

Join us for a candid discussion of queer perspectives in mathematics, highlighting the stories and journeys of three LGBTQ+ mathematicians.

Panel discussion with:

Mike Hill, University of California, Los Angeles

Mike Hill is a professor of mathematics at UCLA. The author or editor of several books and numerous articles, Hill is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and a winner of the 2022 Oswald Veblen Prize. Hill cofounded Spectra, the Association for LGBTQ+ Mathematicians, and he currently serves as its president. 

Juliette Bruce, Brown University 

Juliette Bruce is a postdoc at Brown University where she works in algebraic geometry and commutative algebra. Prior to coming to Brown University, she was an NSF postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley from 2020 to 2022, and she completed her Ph.D. in mathematics in 2020 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has been a board member of Spectra, the associate for LGBTQ+ mathematicians since 2020, and served as Spectra's inaugural president in 2022.