Algebraic Geometry Graduate Reading Course

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Schedule

M: 3:30-5:00, With faculty

W: 3:30-4:30

F: 7:45-8:50

Location: TBA

Discussion Leaders:

Wednesday	Friday	Monday	Leader	Notes
	9/3	9/6	David	AG-Chapter 2
9/8	9/10	9/13	David
9/15	9/17	9/20	Lalit
9/22	9/24	9/27
9/29	10/1	10/4

Structure of Course

Our reading group will meet three times a week. A new discussion leader will lead our meetings each Wednesday, Friday, and Monday. The monday meetings will culminate with a visit from Jordan, David or Andrei to answer that section's questions, provide feedback, and so on.

Homework

Doing exercises is very important in mastering this material. Ravi's notes contain many, many exercises. It's up to you to choose which problems to hand in. Ravi suggests that you choose a varied selection of problems that are personally interesting to you. You should hand in 6 written up exercises each Wednesday, starting September 8th. LaTeX'ing your solution is strongly recommended. Ask another grad student if you need help learning TeX.

We'll collect homework at our meeting, and distribute it to the grader. In fairness to our grader, no late homework will be accepted.

Responsibilities of Discusssion Leaders

Discussion leaders are responsible for leading a full week of seminars, Wednesdays through Monday.

In the week before you are a DL:

1. Check Ravi's blog. Remeber that notes are posted every two weeks. Get a feel for what we should be discussing during your week. Are we starting a new set of notes? Are we finishing the previous set?
2. Get comfortable with editing this wiki. If necessary, create the page for your section of notes (we aim to have a page devoted for each chapter in Ravi's notes). The discussion leader is responsible for posting our comments, questions, and other thoughts in the wiki. Ask Lalit or David for help. Some formatting help is available here
3. Decide which sections we should read on by the Wednesday, Friday, and Monday of your week. Note: We want to cover all sections that Ravi recommends. For example, if he says skip 2.7 Spectral Sequences, we should. Otherwise nothing should be left out.
4. Important: Email this schedule to reading group no later than Friday the week before you take over.

During your week:

1. Be ready to lead the class in a discussion of the material. How you want this to look is up to you. It is not necessary to lecture, and do not feel the need to present the material (everybody should have read the same thing you have read). On the other hand, you should plan to talk about each section of the notes. Discuss the nuances and the big picture ideas or ask what the big picture is. Tell us what you got stuck on. It's not necessary to have mastered the material, just to have some starting points for discussion.
2. Each day you lead discussion, set aside some time for talking about the problems that appear.
3. Make an effort to include everyone in the discussion. What is easy for you may not be easy for someone else. You might have learned tensor products in 3rd grade, but another student may be lost.
4. Important: Every day we meet, keep a list of what we thought was easy, tricky and what specific questions we have. This will form a starting point for what we want to discuss with faculty. Look at previous discussion pages for examples of the type of questions & comments to keep track of.
5. After each meeting post these questions & comments to the wiki.
6. Very important: On the Friday of your week, email our faculty sponsors with the list of questions/thoughts/ruminations from the week (or just a link to the wiki page you created). The faculty need this information on Friday, so that the following Monday they're prepared to meet with us.