Recent Developments in Higher Dimensional Algebraic Geometry Conference

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The Johns Hopkins University Department of Mathematics, together with theJapan-U.S. Mathematics Institute (JAMI), will hold a conference andworkshop in March 2006 under the title "Recent developments in higherdimensional algebraic geometry". The main focus of the proposed activitywill be birational geometry. Finding good birational models of algebraicvarieties and understanding the way these appear is the main achievementof the minimal model program. The activity will cover related topics ofinterest: derived categories, Fano varieties, Mori-Fano fiber spaces,explicit 3-fold geometry, minimal log discrepancies, singularities,rational curves and connectivity. Geometry is one of the oldest mathematical subjects. The Greeks weredescribing geometrical objects using congruence (of segments, angles,...) and incidences (collinearity, tangency, ...). Congruence evolvedinto the modern-day differential geometry. Incidences evolved intoalgebraic geometry simply by replacing geometrical shapes by theequations defining them. The objects of study of algebraic geometry arecalled algebraic varieties. Understanding the structure of algebraicvarieties is of fundamental importance from both the standpoint ofalgebraic geometry alone, and from that of the related disciplines andareas of application - mathematical physics, computational geometry,number theory, and others. Knowledge of algebraic varieties is alsoimportant in applied fields, such as optimization, control, statistics,economics and bioinformatics, coding, complexity and communications.