Auslander Distinguished Lectures Another Success!
The annual Maurice Auslander Distinguished Lectures and International Conference took place April 25-30, 2012, at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. The Lectures were sponsored by Bernice Auslander, and the Conference was sponsored by the NSF. 
Professor Ragnar-Olaf Buchweitz of University of Toronto delivered the first Distinguished Lecture on Saturday, April 28. In it, he gave a moving recollection of his mathematical interactions with Maurice Auslander during his stay at Brandeis in 1981-1983. That work eventually led to the theory of Cohen-Macaulay approximations, a fundamental tool in both commutative algebra and representation theory.
Bernice Auslander, who had moved to Chicago, was unable to attend this year’s event, but she did watch the first Distinguished lecture, which was webcast in real time using funds from the office of the Dean of Science.
In the second lecture, delivered on Sunday, April 29, Professor Buchweitz gave a fascinating overview on the work surrounding Orlov’s octahedron theorem, which provided an unexpected unifying framework for several results in the context of graded Cohen-Macaulay modules.
The Lectures had a record-breaking attendance, totaling 67 participants.
The International Conference was particularly successful this year; using NSF funds we were able to invite participants from Argentina, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Norway, and Russia. The seven invited expository talks and many student talks were very well received. Also, several members of the Northeastern Mathematics Department gave lectures to this large international audience. Long coffee breaks and lunches at the conference center were very fruitful and enjoyable events in which participants discussed mathematics on the balcony with a beautiful view of the ocean.
The American Mathematical Society has invited us to submit proceeding of this conference for publication in their Contemporary Mathematics series. These proceedings will consist of expository notes by invited speakers and selected conference speaker. As with the Distinguished Lectures and International Conference the target audience consists of students and young researchers. As one student put it, this event is the sole opportunity for young people in the United States to participate in a large international gathering focused on the representation theory of algebras.
For information about next year's Auslander Conference please click here.
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