The Rising Sea: Vakil Summer Reading Group (Summer 2021)
Resources
We intend to cover parts I-IV of Vakil’s notes, focusing on problems he suggested.
Schedule
| Date | Leader | Reading | Problems |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tuesday (05/18) | Ivan | 1.1-1.3 Categories and Functors | N/A |
| Thursday (05/20) | Ivan | 1.4-1.6 (Co)Limits, Adjoints, Ab Categories | N/A |
| Tuesday (05/25) | Ivan | 2.1-2.4 Intro to Sheaves | 1.1-1.3 |
| Thursday (05/27) | Ivan | 2.5-2.7 Sheaf constructions | 1.4-1.6 |
| Tuesday (06/01) | Ivan | 3.1-3.3 Intro to Schemes | 2.1-2.4 |
| Thursday (06/03) | Ivan | 3.4-3.7 Scheme Constructions | 2.5-2.7 |
| BREAK | |||
| Thursday (06/10) | John | 4.1-4.3 Structure Sheaves and General Schemes | |
| Tuesday (06/15) | John | 4.4-4.5 + catch up Projective Schemes and Proj | |
| Thursday (06/17) | Ivan | 5.1-5.4 Properties of Schemes | 4.1-4.3 (4.1.A, 4.3.A, 4.3.F, 4.3.G) |
| Tuesday (06/22) | 5.5 + catch up Associated Points and Primes | 4.5 + catch up (4.4.D, 4.5.E) | |
| Thursday (06/24) | 6.1-6.4 Morphisms of Schemes | 5.1-5.4 (5.1.E, 5.2.F, 5.3.C, 5.3.H, 5.4.H, 5.4.J if you are Ivan) | |
| Tuesday (06/29) | 6.5 + catch up Rational Maps from Reduced Schemes | 5.5 + catch up | |
| Thursday (07/01) | 7.1-7.3 Useful classes of morphisms of schemes | 6.1-6.4 | |
| Tuesday (07/06) | 7.4 + catch up Images of Morphisms: Chevalley’s Theorem and Elimination Theory | 6.5 + catch up | |
| Thursday (07/08) | 8.1-8.3 Closed Embeddings and Related Notions | 7.1-7.3 | |
| Tuesday (07/13) | 8.4 + catch up Effective Cartier Divisors, Regular Sequences and Regular Embeddings | 7.4 + catch up | |
| BREAK | |||
| Tuesday (08/04) | 9.1-9.3 Intro to Fibered Products | 8.1-8.3 | |
| Thursday (08/06) | 9.4, 9.6, 9.7 Base Changes, Products, Normalization | 8.4 + catch up | |
| Tuesday (08/11) | 10.1-10.2 Separated Morphisms | 9.1-9.3 | |
| Thursday (08/13) | 10.3 + catch up Proper Morphisms | 9.4, 9.6, 9.7 | |
| Tuesday (08/18) | 11.1-11.2 Dimension and Noether Normalization | 10.1-10.2 | |
| Thursday (08/20) | 11.3-11.4 Codimension 1 and Dimension of Fibers | 10.3 + catch up | |
| Tuesday (08/25) | 12.1-12.3 Zariski Tangent Spaces, Regularity and Smoothness | 11.1-11.2 | |
| Thursday (08/27) | 12.4-12.6 Bertini’s Theorem, DVRs, Smooth and Étale Morphisms | 11.3-11.4 | |
| Tuesday (08/31) | N/A | 12.1-12.3 | |
| Thursday (09/02) | N/A | 12.4-12.6 |
General Meeting Structure
We’ll meet twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday via zoom. Each meeting we’ll read about half of a chapter from The Rising Sea. We’ll have a volunteer each time to be the discussion leader. The role of the discussion leader will be to summarize the main ideas from the section, and can include any thoughts they had about the section as sort of discussion fodder. Importantly, the discussion leader should not lecture. The point of this time is to work out difficulties we had with the reading together, not give an in-depth recap. I’ll be the discussion leader for the first meeting.
We’ll need people to volunteer to lead at least two discussions. You can see roughly what topics we will cover when and sign up to be a discussion leader here. As you will see, we intend to skip starred and double starred sections of the text. If you’re interested in reading those sections you can do that on your own and tell us about it when we discuss…
The majority of the time each meeting will be spent discussing problems, since a lot of understanding the content of this book lies in doing the problems. Ivan and I have found that we really want a long time to meditate on problems in Vakil in order to get the most out of them. So, we have chosen to stagger the problems from the readings by a week: e.g. we’ll talk about problems from section 1.1-1.3 a week after we discuss those sections. Because of this, the first week’s meetings are likely to be quite short.
Obviously two meetings every week can be a lot, so no one should feel like they have to attend every single meeting. However, I think it will work best if everyone comes as much as possible.