Sunday, April 16, 2017

Great Thanks!

Let me express my heartfelt thanks to the organizers of the Shanghai 2017 NCG-event



as well as to each participant. Your presence and talks were the most wonderful gift showing so many lively facets of mathematics and physics displaying the vitality of NCG! The whole three weeks were a pleasure due to the wonderful hospitality of our hosts, Xiaoman Chen, Guoliang Yu and Yi-Jun Yao. It is great that the many talks of the three workshops have been recorded in video which will be put online after being edited into appropriate format and upon approval of each speaker. For now the list of abstracts (which will be updated when I get the missing abstracts) is available here, with a few last minute nuances which I will mention:
Farzad Fathizadeh could not come because of obvious worries on getting back in US after a trip abroad in the DT times. So his talk on the second day of the first workshop was delivered by Masoud Khalkhali. On the second week, Dennis Sullivan gave a wonderful improvised talk (not the same as in the abstract) on the subject of "Sobolev manifolds" i.e. manifolds in which the natural regularity of functions is to have a first derivative in L^p where the critical case is when p=d is the dimension of the manifold. Dennis was as he used to be in IHES, making key comments in every talk on the second week. His generosity with his time and devotion to "understanding" showed at their best. There were many many interactions during these three weeks and it will take time to digest them, but modernity does have some advantages and the recording of the talks should help a lot!  For sure there was a general feeling of ongoing excitement to see how the field of NCG has developed and branched so diversely after 40 years, and each of the words connected to this special event went straight to my heart.
ps: Here is the "histoire courte" with Jacques Dixmier, so remarkably well elaborated by Anne Papillault and Jean-François Dars, which was shown on the large screen at the banquet on 01/04
and here is a link to the photos Jean-François took on April first !

Monday, April 10, 2017

DAVID

It is with immense emotion and sorrow that we learnt the sudden death of David Goss. 
He was our dear friend, a joyful supporter of our field and a constant source of inspiration through his great work, of remarkable originality and depth, on function field arithmetics.
We are profoundly saddened by this tragic loss.
 David will remain in our heart, we shall miss him dearly.