Ravi Vakil's homepage

I am a Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University, and the David Huntington Faculty Scholar. I hold a National Science Foundation CAREER grant (2003-2008). I have received the presidential award PECASE (links 1 and 2), the Brown Faculty Fellowship, and the André-Aisenstadt Prize from the CRM in Montréal. (This last may give you a clue that I am Canadian.) I received the 2004-05 Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching, and have recently completed an American Mathematical Society Centennial Fellowship, a Frederick E. Terman fellowship, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. I'll be the Mathematical Association of America's 2009 Hedrick Lecturer. My office is 383-Q.

The Department of Mathematics, including directions. Searchable and printable campus maps. The former shows the math department. Stanford University.
Some publications and preprints.
If you are thinking of doing your Ph.D. with me, read this.
I co-organize:
- The Algebraic Geometry Seminar.
- The Berkeley-Stanford Algebraic Geometry Colloquium.

This fall, I am teaching:

Math 120: Modern Algebra, Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:30-10:45 in 380-X.
Math 245: Topics in algebraic gometry: Curves on an algebraic surface, Tuesdays and Thursdays 11-12:15 in 381-T.

Last year, I taught a three-quarter sequence on the Foundations of Algebraic Geometry. Here are course notes from the 2005-06 course. I hope to post a much-revised version of these at some point.

Up until Fall 2007, I coordinated the William Lowell Putnam competition at Stanford, and in conjunction with that I ran a weekly problem-solving seminar for talented undergraduates, as well as a Masterclass for experts. More information here.

Older teaching links.

For students (high school and undergraduate)

I am the faculty advisor for the Stanford Math Circle (for high school students). For more information, or to sign up, click here.
For high school students: the Stanford Math Circle (see above), the Stanford University Math Camp, the Berkeley Math Circle, the Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY), and other summer programs outside the Bay Area.
Research Experiences for Undergraduates and other information for talented undergrads.
Fun Math Facts at Harvey Mudd. The canonical mathematical competitions page, by Kiran Kedlaya. Mathematical Mayhem (a journal I co-founded, now part of Crux Mathematicorum). More links here.
(not just for students) Letters of recommendation.

Algebraic geometry $Vakil's degeneration sequence$

Conferences in algebraic geometry.
Algebraic geometry at Stanford. Click here to find out how to join our mailing list. This is for people thinking of working in algebraic geometry. Interesting doctoral students to talk to: Jack Hall, Yuncheng Lin, Jason Lo, Nikola Penev, Joe Rabinoff, Yu-jong Tzeng, Kirsten Wickelgren, Ziyu Zhang, ....
Some computer programs of interest to algebraic geometers. Also, Frank Sottile has created some animations illustrating some of the ideas behind the geometric Littlewood-Richardson rule (see preprints 15 and 17 on my preprints page). Click on the picture on the right to see them.

Miscellaneous mathematics

Eprint archive. Mathscinet.
I serve on the editorial boards of:
- Advances in Mathematics
- Algebra and Number Theory
- Canadian Journal of Mathematics
- Canadian Mathematical Bulletin
- Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra
- Gokova Geometry and Topology Journal
- the Mathematical Intelligencer (I edit a column with Michael Kleber)
- FOCUS (published by the Math. Ass. of America)

Department of Mathematics, Stanford University, Stanford CA USA 94305
phone: 650-725-6284 fax: 650-725-4066 E-mail: vakil[at]math[dot]you-know-where[dot]edu