Durham Symposium on
interactions of birational geometry with other fields

2-7 July 2012, University of Durham, UK (Talks start on 2 July and end on 6 July)


Organisers: Caucher Birkar (Cambridge), Ivan Cheltsov (Edinburgh), and Tim Browning (Bristol)

Scientific advisors: Shigefumi Mori (RIMS), Miles Reid (Warwick), Yuri Tschinkel (Courant)


The focus of the symposium will be on the many interactions of birational geometry with other fields of mathematics such as moduli spaces, arithmetic geometry, differential geometry, derived categories, group theory, etc.



Current list of speakers:

  1. Katia Amerik (Paris-Sud) 
  2. Alexey Bondal (Steklov) 
  3. Nero Budur (Notre Dame) 
  4. Frederic Campana (Nancy) 
  5. Paolo Cascini (Imperial College) 
  6. Jean-Pierre Demailly (Grenoble) 
  7. Igor Dolgachev (Michigan) 
  8. Simon Donaldson (Imperial College) 
  9. Osamu Fujino (Kyoto) 
  10. Yujiro Kawamata (Tokyo) 
  11. Ludmil Katzarkov (Wien) 
  12. Stephane Lamy (Toulouse) 
  13. James McKernan (MIT) 
  14. Shigefumi Mori (RIMS)* 
  15. Atsushi Moriwaki (Kyoto) 
  16. Yuji Odaka (Kyoto) 
  17. Mihai Paun (Nancy) 
  18. Yuri Prokhorov (Moscow State) 
  19. Nick Shepherd-Barron (Cambridge) 
  20. Damiano Testa (Warwick) 
  21. Burt Totaro (Cambridge) 
  22. Yuri Tschinkel (Courant) 
  23. Hajime Tsuji (Sophia) 
  24. Chenyang Xu (MIT) 

* means to be confirmed.


Plenary lectures:

We are planning to have several survey lectures each of which reviews fundamental connections of birational geometry with a particular field. These are meant to be less technical but more inspiring and indicative of future research. The current list is this:
  • Nero Budur: Birational geometry and singularities. 
  • Osamu Fujino: Birational geometry and Hodge theory. 
  • Yujiro Kawamata: Birational geometry and derived categories. 
  • Mihai Paun: Birational geometry and analytic geometry. 
  • Yuri Tschinkel: Birational geometry and arithmetic geometry.