3. Postdoctoral Program - MSRI

Final report
for MSRI funded postdoc at Stanford, 2010-11.
Anton Dochtermann
My MSRI funded postdoc ran from August 1, 2010 through May 31, 2011. I was given office
space at Stanford University where my postdoctoral mentor was Professor Gunnar Carlsson. In
addition, I spent some scheduled time at UC Berkeley meeting with colleagues and participating in
seminars there. Included here is a brief description of some of my mathematical activities during
this time.
• Seminars
In addition to attending several local regular seminars during the academic year (UC Berkeley
combinatorics, Stanford topology, Stanford algebraic geometry, UC Berkeley commutative
algebra, etc.), I also helped organize the following.
– Topological combinatorics at UCB
In Fall 2010 and Spring 2011 I co-organized a reading seminar on Topological Combinatorics
at UC Berkeley with Alex Engström. The topic for the Fall quarter was Moment
angle complexes and generalized Davis-Januskiewicz spaces and the topic for Spring was
Matroid bundles and combinatorial classifying spaces, and we also had a handful of visitors
give talks on related topics. A link for the seminar can be found here
http://math.stanford.edu/ anton/seminar2011.html
The seminar was well attended (about 8 consistent participants, along with other ’dropins’)
and was a good learning opportunity for those involved, leading to potential future
projects.
– Computational topology at Stanford
In the Fall 2010, Winter 2011, and Spring 2011 seminars I participated in the weekly
computational topology reading seminar at Stanford. This mostly involved participants
presenting research papers relevant to the interests of the group, with some discussion
following. The seminar was comprised of grad students, a few postdocs (including myself),
and a faculty member. It was good opportunity for me to familiarize myself with
the current research in the area.
• Conferences and talks
Over the course of the last year, I presented my own research at a number of local and
(inter)national seminars and conferences. In most case travel funding from the MSRI made
it possible to attend the meetings that were held outside of the bay area. The included the
following.
– UC Berkeley Discrete Math Seminar
– U Washington Combinatorics Seminar
– U Miami Combinatorics Seminar
1