Johan finds new challenges at GitHub

Starting the first of March 2021 Johan left DTU for a job at GitHub as a Research Engineer. The algebra group would like to thank him for his input, energy and enthusiasm throughout the years. Best of luck with your new job!

After a highly successful postdoc in the algebra group, Sven obtained a new position as a postdoc at the Technical University of Munich. We would like to thank Sven for his work in the algebra group and wish him all the best for the future!

As part of the DTU outreach activities towards high schools, Peter gave a guest lecture on solving cubic polynomial equations. The activities are organized within the framework of an InterMat workshop (see https://matematicum.dtu.dk/intermat for information. Danish only). With various high school students listening online, an explanation was given on how to use Tschirnhaus transforms to obtain the famous Cardano solution formulas. The same method can be used to solve the quartic equation.

On the 15th of October, a new PhD student named Lara Vicino started in the algebra group. She will be supervised by Peter Beelen and co-supervised by Maria Montanucci. Her project is about determining upper bounds on the number of points on a curve defined over a finite field in terms of the degree of the curve.

This month, the paper “Hyperplane Sections of Determinantal Varieties over Finite Fields and Linear Codes” appeared in the September issue of the journal Discrete Mathematics. The paper is written by Peter and Prof. Sudhir Ghorpade from IIT Bombay, a regular guest of the algebra group with whom Peter has written several papers before. A preprint can be found here.

On May 28-29, Peter co-organized a workshop with Fabien Pazuki from Copenhagen University. The workshop was part of a series of activities organized by N^3 (Nordic Number theory Network, see here for more information). Though originally planned to take place at DTU, the event was held online due to the covid19 situation.

In the period January 6-17, Peter visited Tromsø (Norway), where the Arctic University of Norway is located. His host, Prof. Trygve Johnsen has visited the algebra group in the past during his sabattical. During Peter’s visit, he finished two papers and initiated a new one, so the visit was very productive!

Peter and Grigory participated in the workshop MWCC in the period July 15-16. In this workshop experts from all over the world shared their latest insights on codes and their applications in cryptography. Peter gave a talk on his work with postdoc Prasant Singh on the decoding of codes from Grassmann varieties. Grigory presented a poster on the fast encoding of AG codes.

Peter Beelen participated in the biannual AGCT conference (10-14 June 2019) in CIRM, Luminy, France. The initials of this conference refer to Arithmetic, Geometry, Cryptography and Coding Theory. Invited researchers from all over the world meet in this conference to discuss recent developments on the interplay of arithmetic, geometry and their applications in cryptography and coding theory. The conference center is located near the famous Calanques, a natural park near the coast of the Mediterranean sea.

On the 20-22 May, a workshop organized by Nurdagül Anbar, Alp Bassa, Peter Beelen and Sudhir Ghorpade took place at Bogazici University and Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey. The topic of the workshop was polynomials and curves over finite fields. From the algebra group, apart from Peter, Maria Montanucci and Prasant Singh participated .