This is the current homepage of the UW Student Algebraic Geometry Seminar. The seminar will be held on Thursdays at 3:00PM in PDL C-401 during the Fall 2026 quarter. The goal of the seminar is to foster engagement with modern research in algebraic geometry (broadly interpreted) and provide a forum for graduate students to present and discuss aspects of their work and readings. The seminar will also feature some talks by faculty in the department. If you would like to give a talk or have any questions, please contact Daniel Rostamloo (rostam[at]uw[dot]edu).
Talks for the Fall 2026 Quarter
Click on a title to reveal the corresponding abstract. Titles and abstracts may appear first on the math department calendar.
| October 8 | Piotr PstrągowskiAlgebraic K-theory and etale cohomologyAlgebraic K-theory is a fundamental categorical construction on rings, or more generally varieties, with many connections to topology and number theory. In general, it is very difficult to compute (for example, we still don’t know the K-theory of the integers). Interestingly, K-theory is much easier to understand after suitable completion, where it turns out to be closely related to a more geometric invariant known as etale cohomology. This talk will take a leisurely stroll through some of these beautiful ideas. |
| October 15 | Daniel RostamlooSolid GeometryI will try to give a high-level overview of Clausen-Scholze’s theory of light condensed mathematics with a view toward its structure in the solid setting. In the end, the resulting setup of solid analytic stacks provides a uniform framework for studying non-archimedean geometry – this includes schemes, formal schemes, and rigid analytic varieties. |
| October 22 | Alex Scheffelin (Columbia)Formal SchemesFormal schemes were introduced by Grothendieck to geometrize the idea of taking the completion of a ring which corresponds to taking “formal” analytic / power series functions around a closed subset. They find a lot of use in deformation theory in particular, being related to Artin algebrization and Grothendieck’s existence theorem. Unfortunately, the theory of formal schemes is often understudied. While the basics of the theory exist in EGA, and to an even lesser extent in Hartshrone’s book, a lot of the theory of formal schemes exists in scattered papers throughout the literature. Furthermore, as they are often used to solve particular problems, the definitions can vary very slightly, making them a topic unfamiliar for many young algebraic geometers. In this talk we will define formal schemes, and take the time to highlight some of their properties unintuitive aspects of their theory, but also highlight how this can be very useful as well. I will provide complete proofs of various results which I do not know are compiled in a single source to show how one can work with them. |
| October 29 | Giovanni InchiostroTBATBA |
| November 5 | Ting GongTBATBA |
| November 12 | Karl Schwede (University of Utah)TBATBA |
| November 19 | Mallory DolorfinoTBATBA |
| December 3 | Arkamouli DebnathTBATBA |
| December 10 | Haocheng CaiTBATBA |
The seminar was founded in Fall 2023 by Arkamouli Debnath, who also organized it through Fall 2024. The old seminar homepage can be found here. Since January 2025, it has been organized by Daniel Rostamloo.