Seminar in algebraic statistics and tropical geometry Time: Tuesdays 10.15-12.00 Venue: Seminar rom B 71 (7. etg), Niels Henrik Abels hus Organiser: Kristian Ranestad
This is one of the seminars this fall of The Algebra and Algebraic Geometry group, Department of Mathematics, University of Oslo General information about the mailing list for the seminars of this group can be found at the link: algebra-seminar[at]math.uio.no.
The purpose of the seminar is to introduce and discuss some new techniques and theories that has attracted interest both in mathematics and in computational biology. Allthough our main focus will be on the techniques themselves, we will also discuss applications. The first part of the seminar title, algebraic statistics, refers to commutative algebra methods applied in statistics more than statistical methods in algebra. Applications in computational biology will be the primary examples we have in mind, and we will spend some time on sequence alignment problems from biology and hidden Markov models in statistics to motivate the algebraic methods. The second part, tropical geometry, is a new development in geometry with a growing number of applications, now also in computational biology. It is the geometry of polynomials with real coefficients, where the ordinary addition and multiplication is replaced by taking the minimum and addition. It is sometimes called tropical algebraic geometry to explain the close relations to classical algebraic geometry. The seminar is meant for students at the end of their bachelor studies, master students and PhD students. Most of the material for the seminar will be taken from the first half of the recent book http://bio.math.berkeley.edu/ascb/.
Program We continue the seminar of the last fall, and alternate between topics from the book and topics in tropical geometry.     First seminar: 24. January
24. January	Kristian Ranestad Trees and metrics
31. January	Magnus Vigeland Tropical varieties and maps
14. February	Magnus Vigeland Tropical varieties and maps II
21. February	Kristian Ranestad Implicitization and phylogenetic invariants
28. February	Torunn Hegna Om multippel alignement (starter kl 11.00)
14. March	Janko Boehm Mirror symmetry and tropical geometry (kl 14.15 i B71)
28. March	Magnus Vigeland Tropisk plangeometri
4. April	Magnus Vigeland Tropisk plangeometri II
16. Mai	Kristian Ranestad Parametrisk alignement
2006	Notice the summer school http://www.math.uio.no/div/nordfjordeid/astg.html