Ravi Vakil

WAGS aims to build a regional community among algebraic geometers of all career stages, from advanced undergraduates to full professors. The meetings are centered around research talks delivered by leading mathematicians from around the world...

Euler’s famous formula tells us that (with appropriate caveats), a map on the sphere with f countries (faces), e borders (edges), and v border-ends (vertices) will satisfy v-e+f=2. And more generally, for a map on a surface with g holes, v-e+f=2-2g...

Four ordered points on the projective line, up to projective equivalence, are classified by the cross ratio, a notion introduced by Cayley. This theory can be extended to more points, leading to one of the first important examples of an invariant...

About the Niven Lectures: Ivan Niven was a famous number theorist and expositor; his textbooks have won numerous awards and have been translated into many languages. They are widely used to this day. Niven was born in Vancouver in 1915, earned his...

Doodling has many mathematical aspects: patterns, shapes, numbers,and more. Not surprisingly, there is often some sophisticated and funmathematics buried inside common doodles.I’ll begin by doodling, and see where it takes us.It looks like play, but...

We consider the "limiting behavior'' of {\em discriminants}, by which we mean informally the closure of the locus in some parameter space of some type of object where the objects have certain singularities. We focus on the space of partially labeled...