The Algebra group was visited by Julian Renner for one week in November 2019. Julian is a PhD student at TU Munich and has published several papers with postdoc Sven Puchinger.
During the visit, Johan, Sven, and Julian worked on generic decoding in the sum-rank metric and on low-rank parity-check codes over finite rings. Julian also gave a very nice talk on “Key Compression for Rank-Based Cryptosystems” in the algebra group colloquium.
The Algebra group has a great new addition: Postdoc Sven Puchinger started 1st October on his 2-year H. C. Ørsted fellowship. Sven Puchinger has his PhD Degree from the University of Ulm under the supervision of Martin Bossert (where Johan was also a postdoc in 2014-2015), and he spent the last 1,5 years as a postdoc at Technical University of Munich.
His research interests are broadly within algebraic coding theory, from new code constructions to decoding and fancy applications. Sven already has numerous joint papers with Johan and Peter, and we foresee that his postdoc here will be very fruitful.
Maria and Giovanni Zini are happy to share the news that their joint paper “Quotients of the Hermitian curve from subgroups of PGU(3,q) without fixed points or triangles” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics. There the genera of quotients of the Hermitian curve from semiregular subgroups of PGU(3,q) (that is, fixing neither points nor triangles in the plane) are computed. A preprint can be found here.
Grigory and Leonardo created this great cartoon explaining the principles and importance of coding theory – illustrated by a cross-galactic love story!
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.
Maria’s paper “On plane curves given by separated polynomials and their automorphisms” (joint work with Giovanni Zini and Matteo Bonini) appeared in Advances in Geometry. Here the automorphism group of curves of type A(x)=B(y), where A has degree prime to p and B is a linearized polynomial is computed over finite fields of characteristic p. A preprint can be found here.
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 .
Peter Beelen and Maria Montanucci from the algebra group have visited the Antalya Algebra Days, which this year took place in the Nesin mathematical village in Turkey from the 15th till the 19th of May. Peter gave a talk about his recent research on generalized Hamming weights of Reed-Muller like codes, some of which the carried out together with former postdoc Mrinmoy Datta.
