3. Postdoctoral Program - MSRI

Bogart, Tristram
Brugalle, Erwan
Tropical Geometry Program
Tristam received Ph.D. at the University of Washington in 2007 under
the supervision of Rekha R. Thomas. His dissertation was titled
“Problems in Computational Algebra and Integer Programming”. Before
attending MSRI, he had begun a project with Ethan Cotterill on the
tropical version of Clemens' theorem on rational curves in hypersurfaces.
Erwan Brugalle joined the team on this project during the MSRI
semester. Tristram‟s understanding of the floor diagram approach to
tropical curves was greatly increased by talking to Clemen, Florian
Block, and Kristen Shaw at MSRI. Tristram also began a related project
with Eric Katz, "Obstructions to lifting tropical curves in hypersurfaces."
They identified a specific local obstruction for curves inside
hypersurfaces in tropical three- or four-space. They can use it to better
understand several examples, including one by Magnus Vigeland and
one by Diane Maclagan. They are currently writing the paper and plan to
submit it to a journal in the next few weeks. After the tropical semester,
Tristram returned to Queen's University for his fifth and last semester as
a postdoc. In 2010-11, he is an MSRI-funded postdoc at San Francisco
State, in the early stages of projects with SFSU faculty Federico Ardila
(on the tropical Grassmannian) and Joseph Gubeladze (on the space of
affine maps between two fixed polygons, which is itself a polytope.)
Erwan received his Ph.D. at the Université de Paris VI in 2004 under the
supervision of Ilia Itenberg. His dissertation was titled “Real lgebraic
curves and real pseudoholomorphic curves in ruled surfaces”.
At MSRI, he collaborated with other members of the Tropical Geometry
Program such as Grigory Mikhalkin, Lucia Lopez de Medrano, Hannah
Markwig, Ethan Cotterill and Tristram Bogart, Josephine Yu, and Ilia
Zharkov. In addition, he established many new contacts that will
certainly be fruitful in the near future. He had the opportunity to learn a
lot from these new contacts. In conclusion, according to Erwan, his
postdoc at MSRI has been very profitable for him: it enlarged his
mathematical panorama. He finished ongoing works, started new ones,
and made new contacts. He‟s looking forward for a next stay at MSRI!
Erwan currently holds the position of Maître de Conférence at the Jussieu
University - Paris 6.
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