David Eisenbud Distinguished Lecturer

Free Resolutions, Finite and Infinite

David Eisenbud
Department of Mathematics
University of California, Berkeley

Friday, April 18, 2025
4:00 pm
120 Snow Hall
Reception at 3:30 pm, 406 Snow

The free resolution of a module refines its presentation by generators and relations. The theory has been important in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry since the time of Cayley and Hilbert.

I will explain some of the history of this theory from the early work on finite resolutions to some recent results and conjectures about infinite resolutions.

David Eisenbud received his PhD in mathematics in 1970 at the University of Chicago under Saunders MacLane and Chris Robson, and was on the faculty at Brandeis University from 1970 until becoming. Professor of Mathematics at UC Berkeley in 1997. His mathematical interests range widely over commutative and non-commutative algebra, algebraic geometry, topology, and computer methods.

Eisenbud served as Director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute from 1997-2007 and 2013-2022. He worked for the Simons Foundation from 2009 to 2011 creating the Foundation's grant program in Mathematics and the Physical Sciences. He is currently on the Board of Directors of the Foundation, the Banff International Research Station (BIRS) and the Fields Institute for Research in the Mathematical Sciences. He is also a Director of Math for America, a foundation devoted to improving mathematics teaching.

Eisenbud has been a member of the Board of Mathematical Sciences and their Applications of the National Research Council, and the U.S. National Committee of the International Mathematical Union. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, and in Bonn, and Paris. He is currently Chair of the Editorial Board of the Algebra and Number Theory journal, which he helped found in 2006, and serves on the Board of the Journal of Software for Algebra and Geometry, as well as Springer-Verlag’s book series Algorithms and Computation in Mathematics and Graduate Texts in Mathematics.

In 2006, Eisenbud was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He won the 2010 Leroy P. Steele Prize for Exposition for his book “Commutative Algebra, with a View toward Algebraic Geometry” and the 2020 Award for Distinguished Public Service, both from the American Mathematical Society