In the period May 6-18, the algebra group will be visited by Assistant Prof. Mrinmoy Datta (IIT Hyderabad). Mrinmoy has been a postdoc in the algebra group in the past, so we will be welcoming back an old friend. The goal of the visit is to study properties of a famous maximal curve: the Hermitian curve.
A new preprint on a maximal curve with third largest genus is now available on arXiv here.
The authors are algebra group members Peter Beelen and Maria Montanucci as well as our former Ph.D. student Lara Vicino. This work was started during Lara’s time as a Ph.D. student, but the final touches of this work could only be given recently. We hope that more collaboration with Lara will take place in the future!
A new preprint on a family of non-isomorphic maximal curves is now available on arXiv here.
It was written by algebra group members Peter Beelen, Maria Montanucci and Jonathan Tilling Niemann together with Luciane Quoos from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. The work was initiated when Luciane visited the algebra group in connection with the Ph.D. defence of Lara Vicino.
Lara has defended her Ph.D. thesis today successfully. The defense went very well and her Ph.D. thesis got an excellent evaluation. Next month, Lara will start a 2-year postdoc position in the mathematics department of the University of Groningen (the Netherlands). Many congratulations to Lara for obtaining her Ph.D. degree as well as finding a job as a postdoctoral researcher!
Last Friday, during DTU’s annual party, Maria obtained the prestigious teacher-of-the-year award. Each year, it is awarded to two teachers who have obtained exceptionally good teaching evaluations. It was her teaching in the course Discrete mathematics 2: algebra, which motivated and impressed the students so much that several of them suggested that the award should go to Maria this year.
Congratulations to Maria with this excellent result!
You can now find a new preprint on the preprint server arXiv. In the article, written by Peter and associate professor Vincent Neiger from Sorbonne University, you can find how to decode AG codes even faster than previously known. This work on this article was started when Vincent visited the algebra group in August 2022 and is a part of the outcome of the DFF-FNU project Correcting on a Curve.
Maria and Lara will participate in the conference Conference On alGebraic varieties over fiNite fields and Algebraic geometry Codes (COGNAC), which will take place February 13-17 at CIRM, Luminy in France.
Maria is in fact an invited speaker and will give the first talk of the conference. The title of her talk is “Algebraic curves with many rational points over finite fields”. Lara’s talk, titled “Weierstrass semigroups at the F_{q^2}-rational points of a maximal curve with the third largest genus”, will be about her latest research with Peter and Maria.
We are delighted to announce that Maria obtained one of the prestigious Villum Young Investigator Grants. The title of her project is “Algebraic curves in information theory: a treasure yet to discover”. This fantastic news means that the algebra group will be able to grow with two postdocs and one PhD student in the coming years. The first postdoc is planned to start after summer this year at the start of Maria’s project. The scheduled end of the project is summer 2028. A description of the project as well as that of the other new Villum Young Investigators’ can be found here.
Congratulations Maria!!
We are happy to announce that Jonathan Tilling Niemann will start as a PhD student in the algebra group. The planned starting date is the 15th of March this year. Jonathan studied mathematics at KU and defended his master’s thesis today with great success obtaining the maximal grade. His PhD project will be supervised by Peter and Maria.
Jonathan will work within the area of maximal curves defined over a finite field. These are algebraic curves that attain the famous Hasse-Weil bound. Such curves are particularly interesting from the point of error-correcting codes as well. In recent years several new families of maximal curves have been found (among others a family discovered by Peter and Maria that is now called the Beelen-Montanucci family of maximal curves). Jonathan’s project is about finding common properties of these families and, if possible, to use the gained insights to find new families of maximal curves. The resulting impact in the area of error-correcting codes will be investigated as well.
Today, Maria gave a talk for the department in connection to the seminar “Meet DTU Compute”. She talked about her work algebraic curves and their uses in coding theory. Title and abstract are given below.
Title: Algebraic curves in coding theory
Abstract: Whether colors in the rainbow or notes in a musical scale, there is a natural human desire to categorize objects, and classifying shapes by their geometric properties has always been a fundamental mathematical research area. Here shapes are grouped into basic geometric objects such as points, lines, figures. However, most geometrical objects occurring in science are so complex that they defy this traditional mathematical description making it hard to classify them. One solution is to use algebra to see what geometric objects have in common, which entails describing them as a set of equations. In this light, algebraic curves are the simplest objects one can study, as in the plane they are given by one single equation.
For a long time, the study of algebraic curves was the province of pure mathematicians. But then, in a series of three papers in the period 1977-1982, Goppa found important applications of algebraic curves over finite fields, and especially of those having many rational points, to coding theory (reliable communication). Since then, many other applications followed naturally.
In this presentation, after a general introduction to coding theory and algebraic curves, the main ideas behind Goppa’s construction will be described together with some more recent applications of algebraic curves in Information Theory.