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MAPTUR. PURE INTERTHEMATIC MATHEMATICS.
The aim of this programm is to promote the study and research of
important problems in Pure Mathematics. The adjective interthematic
is therefore superfluous, addressing a characteristic of all
significant Mathematics: it touches on differents topics. Indeed the
directors of this programm come from three different areas: Algebra,
Analysis and Geometry & Topology. This has a central role in chosing
specific problems to work on. Anyway all selected problems should
have a big variety of objectives and involve researchers coming from
a wide spectrum of subjects.
In the Mathematical Department of the UCM work many different
mathematicians who have reached a considerable success in their
respective fields, as any quality index shows. This is a good
starting point. It seems the moment has come to take adventage of
the critical mass of researchers and to improve the communication
between them; an aspect sometimes forgotten in the past. The
research background and experience of all these scientists make us
confident about the possibilities of progessing a step forward in
the way research has been carried out for many years. The philosophy
of our programm may be explained by saying that we will focus
efforts on teaching and learning, in one single word, on studying. A
sure road to sucessful discoveries.
Up to now there are three research directions:
1. The study of the Topology of Complex Algebraic Varieties has not
only reached deep results but also posed some fundamental questions.
The most relevant case is the Barth-Larsen Theorem from the 70s: The
lower codimension a projective variety has, the more topological
propierties it shares with the projective space. More or less at
that time, Hartshorne stated the most important open problem in the
subject: Are all projective varieties of codimension equal to or
lower than the dimension of the variety minus 2 complete
intersections? From the Barth-Larsen theorem it follows that a
variety with codimension equal to or lower than its dimension minus
2 shares the Picard group with the projective space. And therefore a
hypersuface of the variety is a complete intersection in the variety.
Recent results due to the UCM Research group Geometry of Projective
Algebraic Varieties show that the same holds for other ambient
spaces and suggest a more general Barth-Larsen Theorem.
The first aim is to dealt with other ambient spaces like
Grassmannians and products of projective spaces. This requires to
manage the many different techniques used in Larsen's proof:
homotopy and homology groups, Morse theory, geodesics, Levi forms,
filtrations and spectral sequences, sheaves cohomology... This will
bring together several specialists from Algebra, Analysis, Geometry
and Topology.
Key words: Barth-Larsen Theorem, Morse Theory, Picard group,
Homotopy group, Spectral sequence, small codimension.
2. The second research direction is Subdifferential Calculus and
Hamilton-Jacobi equations on Riemannian manifolds. The
subdifferential of a convex function is a classical tool in Convex
Analysis, Optimization and Control Theory. The subdifferential of a
non necessarily convex function on a Banach space was introduced by
Crandall and Lions in order to study Hamilton-Jacobi equations. This
notion allowed them to define the concept of viscosity solution and
to prove its existance and uniqueness, particularly in many cases
where the classical solution does not exist. More recently, the
basics of first-order subdifferential calculus in Riemannian
manifolds has been settled and applied to Hamilton-Jacobi equations
for uniformly continuous Hamiltonians. In the same vein, it is
interesting to develop a second-order subdifferential calculus on
Riemannian manifolds and apply it to second-order Hamilton-Jacobi
equations. In this context it is also useful to study the
regularization of Lipschitz functions on the manifold. A key
question related to the topic is the classical Myers-Nakai theorem.
This result states that the Riemannian structure of a finite-dimensional
manifold is determined by the structure of the Banach algebra
associated to the space of bounded C^1-functions with bounded
differential on the manifold. The development of the above
techniques will allow the study of the validity of a Myers-Nakai
theorem for infinite dimensions.
Key words: Hamilton-Jacobi equations, Subdifferential calculus,
infinite-dimensional Riemannian structures, Algebras of differential
functions on manifolds.
3. In order to present the research line Geometry of Large Scale
Metric Spaces, K-theory of C*-algebras and Complements of Z-setslet
us consider the shape of the earth. Nowadays it is easy to claim it
is round because we were able to travel to outer space and to look
at it from there. The key question is: Had we been able to get out
of the earth's surface without knowing it is round? We propose to
study from outside the compact metric spaces embedded in certain
special way (called Z-embeddings) in the universe (Hilbert cube). To
compare different structures we study functors between categories.
Mathematics is full of such beautiful examples. Algebraic topology
relates topological spaces and groups, rings and modules... A
special situation are total equivalences between categories, like in
the case of Topological Algebra. Gelfand and Naimark showed that the
study of locally compact Haussdorf spaces is equivalent to the study
of commutative C*-algebras. In the same direction, it was T.C.
Chapman in 1972 who built an equivalence between the Shape Theory of
Z-subsets of the Hilbert cube and the Proper and Weak Homotopy
Theory of their complements and, in some cases, their topological
types. Later M. Gromov introduced the Coarse Geometries developed by
himself and many others like N. Higson, J. Roe, Guoliang Yu, S.
Ferry, S. Weinberger, N. Wright, A. Dranishnikov... Coarse
Geometries have been mainly used in Geometric Theory of Groups to
give partial answers to the conjecture of Novikov, to assign Atiyah-Singer
indexes to operators in non compact Riemannian manifolds and to the
study of the non-commutative geometry of A. Connes. It is also very
important the study of the so called C_0 coarse geometry of metric
spaces, which was introduced by N. Wright. It is clear the wide
spectrum of methods and problems involved in this line and its broad
interest for mathematicians from very differents areas.
Keywords: Hilbert cube, Z-embeddings, Coarse geometries,
Functions vanishing at infinity, C*-algebras, K-theory, Homotopy,
Shape.
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