What's the Point?

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• Alex Shannon (DPMMS)
• Sunday 04 March 2012, 16:45-17:15
• Winstanley Lecture Theatre, Trinity College.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Mary Fortune.

Part of the TMS Symposium

The notion of a ‘point’ in geometry seems fairly basic, but during the 20th century a generalised and abstracted notion provided much new insight and intuition. More recently, studying some of the mathematical ideas underlying theoretical physics has led mathematicians to consider so-called non-commutative geometry. ‘Spaces’ in this setting have algebras of functions on them which are non-commutative, but there is no actual classical geometric space underlying them! However, the generalised notion of a point does allow one to develop a certain amount of geometric intuition. In this talk, I shall explain the modern point of view on points in algebraic geometry, and explain in some examples how this allows one to study non-commutative algebras in a way that resembles what we might normally consider geometry.

This talk is part of the Trinity Mathematical Society series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Guy Emerson's list
• Trinity Mathematical Society
• Winstanley Lecture Theatre, Trinity College
• bld31

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