Seminar

To participate in this seminar, please register here: https://www.msri.org/seminars/25206

This mini course is an introduction to the theory, computation, and applications of Picard-Fuchs differential equations.  The main prerequisite is knowledge of basic complex algebraic geometry at the introductory graduate level.  We will develop a thorough understanding, from several different theoretical perspectives, of some of the key examples in the mathematics and physics literature.  This course should be of interest to geometers, model theorists, and physicists alike.

Charles Doran Bio:

Charles Doran is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Alberta.  His research centers on the arithmetic, geometry, topology, and physics of Calabi-Yau manifolds.  Professor Doran received his Ph.D. From Harvard University in 1999 with the thesis "Picard-Fuchs Uniformization and Geometric Isomonodromic Deformations: Modularity and Variation of the Mirror Map" --  the first thesis on mirror symmetry from the Harvard Mathematics Department -- under the joint supervision of Barry Mazur and Shing-Tung Yau.  From 2009-2015 he was Director of the Alberta site of the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences.  In 2015 he received the Merten M. Hasse Prize of the Mathematical Association of America for his paper "From Polygons to String Theory" with former student, Ursula Whitcher.  He has held the McCalla Professorship of Science at the University of Alberta (2013-2014), the Visiting Campobassi Professorship of Physics at the University of Maryland (2015-2017), a Visiting Professorship of Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics at Brown University (2017-2018), and is an Associate Member of the Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications at Harvard University (2018-present).