3. Postdoctoral Program - MSRI

introduce new aspects, topics, and contacts to the postdoc‟s work. The mentoring program
received a wealth of positive feed-back and led to many new collaborations. Two out of eight
research professors in the program were women, as were 5 out of 23 research members and 5 out
of 16 postdocs.
Besides two introductory workshops and two topical workshops, a number of seminars and
working groups took place throughout the program. Notably, the Tropical Colloquium and the
Tropical Seminar provided opportunities for program participants to report on their latest
progress. A weekly postdoc seminar that ran jointly with the SCGT program provided a forum
for postdocs to talk about their work and interests. The postdoc seminar was followed by an
MSRI-sponsored pizza lunch that provided ample opportunity for informal conversation and
exchange.
A characteristic feature of the Tropical Geometry program was the strong and active
participation of graduate students. This lively group was comprised of students from UC
Berkeley and San Francisco State University, as well as students from other institutions who
came to MSRI together with their doctoral advisors. In addition to a weekly graduate student
seminar, there was a more informal „What-Is‟ Seminar that offered a forum for graduate students
and postdocs to interact and to learn about relevant mathematical concepts.
There was ample interaction with the SCGT program run in parallel at MSRI in the fall of 2009.
This happened both on the informal level of conversations and collaborations and on a more
formal level in the joint postdoc seminar, the mini-course by Denis Auroux (a member of the
SCGT program) in the introductory workshop, and the postdoc position for Brett Parker shared
by both programs. Another highly visible event was the bi-weekly MSRI Evans Lecture Series
organized in collaboration with the SCGT program.
A particularly exciting development was the emerging connection between tropical geometry
and number theory, which was highlighted by the work of Matt Baker, Vladimir Berkovich,
Walter Gubler, and Sam Payne. This was enabled by Payne‟s remarkable result that Berkovich‟s
analytification of an algebraic variety is the inverse limit of all tropical varieties obtained by
choosing a concrete embedding. Walter Gubler solved the longstanding Bogomolov conjecture
on equidistribution of points of bounded height on abelian varieties using tropical analytic
geometry.
Program 3: Homology Theories of Knots and Links (HTKL)
January 11, 2010 to May 21, 2010
Organized by Mikhail Khovanov (Columbia University), Dusa McDuff (Barnard College,
Columbia University), Peter Ozsváth* (Columbia University), Lev Rozansky (University of North
Carolina), Peter Teichner (University of California, Berkeley), Dylan Thurston (Barnard
College, Columbia University), and Zoltan Szabó (Princeton University)
The goals of this program were to
• promote communication with related disciplines, including the symplectic geometry
program in 2009–10;
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