What’s New

Today a workshop took place at DTU in connection to the FNU-project “How secret is a secret?”. Apart from DTU, the participants came from AU and AAU. A short program of the workshop can be found here.

Nurdagül Anbar’s position as postdoctoral researcher in the algebra group finished on the 1st of October after having worked with us for two years.
She now starts a postdoc position at the University of Magdeburg. We will miss her drive, ideas and energy and wish her all the best in her future career!

Her project Curves with many rational points was supported by the HCØrsted COFUND Postdoc programme. Nurdagül has been a successful researcher, having contributed significantly to five project-related articles (and several others besides). Of these five, one has appeared electronically in the Journal of Number Theory, three have been accepted, and one is currently under review.

A workshop on the mathematics of theoretic cryptography organized by NUS and NTU will be held in Singapore from 26th till the 30th of September. Peter Beelen is a key-note speaker for this workshop and will give an overview talk on towers of function fields and their uses in coding theory.

Johan co-organised and participated in Sage Days 75 on Algorithmic Coding Theory, taking place 22-26 August 2016 at Inria in Saclay, France. The workshop was attended by 35-40 SageMath enthusiasts, many of who made their first contributions to SageMath at the workshop.

The workshop served as the Grande Finale of the ACTIS project which Johan was part of. The project employed David Lucas as full-time software developer for two years for improving the Coding Theory support in SageMath.

Associate professor Alp Bassa from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul (Turkey) is visiting the algebra group at DTU in the period 17-25 august. He will work with Peter Beelen and Nurdagül Anbar on various problems in function fields.

8-12 August 2016, Johan participated in a seminar “Coding Theory in the time of Big Data” at the beautiful Schloss Dagstuhl. As is common at Dagstuhl, the seminar had only few talks, leaving ample time for discussion and collaboration on the seminar’s topic. Johan worked mostly on finding new good rank-metric codes and on private information retrieval schemes. He also gave a short talk on Coding Theory in SageMath and the upcoming SageDays 75 on Coding Theory.

Johan presented 22nd July the paper “Algorithms for Simultaneous Padé Approximations”, coauthored with Arne Storjohann at the conference ISSAC 2016, held at Wilfred Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada.

Johan participated in MICA 2016 in Waterloo, Canada, a workshop on computer algebra held in honor of Erich Kaltofen. Erich has many contributions to computer algebra, for example in fast linear algebra, polynomial multiplication, polynomial factorization, and sparse interpolation. These and other topics were covered during the conference.

Sudhir R. Ghorpade from the Department of Mathematics at IIT-Bombay is visiting the algebra group this week. He will together with Peter Beelen and Mrinmoy Datta finish a paper in which several generalized Hamming weights of projective Reed-Muller codes are determined. Compared to the current state-of-the-art in this area, the paper will mark significant progress.

Sudhir has visited DTU several times and has coauthored several papers with Peter and other authors from DTU before. You can see us working on our current project in the picture above.

Peter Beelen will give a talk on Monday June 6 at the 2016 SIAM conference on discrete mathematics in Atlanta, USA.

He will talk about his recent progress, obtained together with postdoc Mrinmoy Datta and Prof. Sudhir Ghorpade from IIT-Bombay, on the determination of the generalized Hamming weights of projective Reed-Muller codes. Knowing these weights helps in finding the answer to a very fundamental question in algebra: “How many solutions can a system of polynomial equations have over a finite field?”