Current Events Bulletin

Introduction to the Current Events Bulletin

Will the Riemann Hypothesis be proved this week? What is the Geometric Langlands Conjecture about? How could you best exploit a stream of data flowing by too fast to capture? I think we mathematicians are provoked to ask such questions by our sense that underneath the vastness of mathematics is a fundamental unity allowing us to look into many different corners though we couldn't possibly work in all of them. I love the idea of having an expert explain such things to me in a brief, accessible way. And I, like most of us, love common-room gossip.

The Current Events Bulletin Session at the Joint Mathematics Meetings, begun in 2003, is an event where the speakers do not report on their own work, but survey some of the most interesting current developments in mathematics, pure and applied. The wonderful tradition of the Bourbaki Seminar is an inspiration, but we aim for more accessible treatments and a wider range of subjects. I've been the organizer of these sessions since they started, but a varying, broadly-constituted advisory committee helps select the topics and speakers. Excellence in exposition is a prime consideration.

A written exposition greatly increases the number of people who can enjoy the product of the sessions, so speakers are asked to do the hard work of producing such articles. These are made into a booklet distributed at the meeting. Speakers are then invited to submit papers based on them to the Bulletin of the AMS, and this has led to many fine publications.

I hope you'll enjoy the papers produced from these sessions, but there's nothing like being at the talks ? don't miss them!

David Eisenbud, Organizer
University of California, Berkeley

Email David Eisenbud

Sessions, Speakers, Booklets and Papers from the Bulletin of the AMS

Select a year

cover of the Current Events Bulletin
Seattle – January 10, 2025
  • Elena Fuchs, University of California, Davis — Apollonian packings: the rise and fall of the local to global conjecture
  • Daniel Pomerleano, University of Massachusetts, Boston — Floer cohomology and invariants of singularities
  • Sarah Peluse, Stanford University — Finding arithmetic progressions in dense sets of integers
  • Jarod Alper, University of Washington — Embracing AI and Formalization: Experimenting with Tomorrow's Mathematical Tools

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Current Events Bulletin Cover 2024
January 5, 2024 (San Francisco, CA)
  • Will Perkins, George Tech:
    Searching for (sharp) thresholds in random structures: where are we now?
  • Hussein Mourtada, Université Paris Cité:
    Hilbert meets Ramanujan: singularity theory and integer partitions.
  • Holly Krieger, University of Cambridge:
    Uniformity when arithmetic meets geometry.
  • Ravi Vakil, Stanford University:
    Passing a curve through n points -- solution of a 100-year-old problem.

Booklet produced for meeting

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Current Events Bulletin Cover 2023
January 6, 2023 (Boston, MA)
  • Andrew Granville, Université de Montréal:
    Missing digits, and good approximations.
  • Christopher Eur, Harvard University:
    An essence of independence: recent works of June Huh on combinatorics and Hodge theory.
  • Henry Cohn, Massachusetts Institute of Technology:
    From sphere packing to Fourier interpolation.
  • Martin Hairer, Imperial College London:
    A stroll around the critical Potts model.

Booklet produced for meeting

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Current Events Bulletin Cover 2022-April
April 8, 2022 (Virtual)
  • Thomas Scanlon, University of California, Berkeley:
    Tame geometry for Hodge theory.
  • Elena Giorgi, Columbia University:
    The stability of black holes with matter.
  • Anup Rao, University of Washington:
    Sunflowers: from soil to oil.
  • Elamin Elbasha, Merck & Co., Inc.:
    Mathematics and the quest for vaccine-induced herd immunity threshold.

Booklet produced for meeting

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Current Events Bulletin Cover 2021
January 18, 2021 (Virtual)
  • Abba Gumel, Arizona State University:
    Mathematics of the Dynamics and Control of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
  • Ana Caraiani, Imperial College London:
    An excursion through the land of shtukas.
  • Jennifer Hom, Georgia Institute of Technology:
    Getting a handle on the Conway knot. Read More
  • Richard Evan Schwartz, Brown University:
    Rectangles, Curves, and Klein Bottles. Read More

Booklet produced for meeting

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Current Events Bulletin Cover 2020
January 17, 2020 (Denver, CO)
  • Jordan S. Ellenberg, University of Wisconsin-Madison:
    Geometry, Inference, and Democracy. Read More
  • Bjorn Poonen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology:
    A p-adic approach to rational points on curves. Read More
  • Suncica Canic, University of California, Berkeley:
    Recent Progress on Moving Boundary Problems. Read More
  • Vlad C. Vicol, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University:
    Convex integration and fluid turbulence. Read More

Booklet produced for meeting

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Current Events Bulletin Cover 2019
January 18, 2019 (Baltimore, MD)
  • Bhargav Bhatt, University of Michigan:
    Perfectoid geometry and its applications.
  • Thomas Vidick, California Institute of Technology:
    Verifying quantum computations at scale: a cryptographic leash on quantum devices. Read More
  • Stephanie van Willigenburg, University of British Columbia:
    The shuffle conjecture. Read More
  • Robert Lazarsfeld, Stony Brook University:
    Tangent Developable Surfaces and the Equations Defining Algebraic Curves. Read More

Booklet produced for meeting

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Current Events Bulletin Cover 2018
January 12, 2018 (San Diego, CA)
  • Richard D. James, University of Minnesota:
    Materials from mathematics. Read More
  • Craig L. Huneke, University of Virginia:
    How complicated are polynomials in many variables?
  • Isabelle Gallagher, Université Paris Diderot:
    From Newton to Navier-Stokes, or how to connect fluid mechanics equations from microscopic to macroscopic scales. Read More
  • Joshua A. Grochow, University of Colorado:
    The Cap Set Conjecture, the polynomial method, and applications (after Croot-Lev-Pach, Ellenberg-Gijswijt, and others). Read More

Booklet produced for meeting

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Current Events Bulletin Cover 2017
January 6, 2017 (Atlanta, GA)
  • Lydia Bieri, University of Michigan:
    Black hole formation and stability: a mathematical investigation. Read More
  • Matt Baker, Georgia Tech:
    Hodge Theory in Combinatorics. Read More
  • Kannan Soundararajan, Stanford University:
    Tao's work on the Erdos Discrepancy Problem. Read More
  • Susan Holmes, Stanford University:
    Statistical proof and the problem of irreproducibility. Read More

Booklet produced for meeting

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Current Events Bulletin Cover 2016
January 8, 2016 (Seattle, WA)
  • Carina Curto, Pennsylvania State University:
    What can topology tell us about the neural code? Read More
  • Lionel Levine, Cornell University, and Yuval Peres, Microsoft Research and University of California, Berkeley:
    Laplacian growth, sandpiles and scaling limits. Read More
  • Timothy Gowers, Cambridge University:
    Probabilistic Combinatorics and the recent work of Peter Keevash. Read More
  • Amie Wilkinson, University of Chicago:
    What are Lyapunov exponents, and why are they interesting? Read More

Booklet produced for meeting

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Current Events Bulletin Cover 2015
January 12, 2015 (San Antonio, TX)
  • Jared S. Weinstein, Boston University:
    Exploring the Galois group of the rational numbers: recent breakthroughs. Read More
  • Andrea R. Nahmod, University of Massachusetts, Amherst:
    The nonlinear Schrodinger equation on tori: integrating harmonic analysis, geometry and probability. Read More
  • Mina Aganagic, University of California, Berkeley:
    String Theory and Math: Why This Marriage May Last. Read More
  • Alex Wright, Stanford University:
    From rational billiards to dynamics on moduli spaces. Read More

Booklet produced for meeting

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Current Events Bulletin Cover 2014
January 17, 2014 (Baltimore, MD)
  • Daniel Rothman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology:
    Earth's Carbon Cycle: A Mathematical Perspective. Read More
  • Karen Vogtmann, Cornell University:
    The geometry of Outer space. Read More
  • Yakov Eliashberg, Stanford University:
    Recent advances in symplectic flexibility. Read More
  • Andrew Granville, Université de Montréal:
    Infinitely many pairs of primes differ by no more than 70 million (and the bound's getting smaller every day). Read More

Booklet produced for meeting

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Current Events Bulletin Cover 2013
January 11, 2013 (San Diego, CA)
  • Wei Ho, Columbia University:
    How many rational points does a random curve have? Read More
  • Sam Payne, Yale University:
    Topology of nonarchimedean analytic spaces. Read More
  • Mladen Bestvina, University of Utah:
    Geometric group theory and 3-manifolds hand in hand: the fulfillment of Thurston's vision for three-manifolds. Read More
  • Lauren Williams, University of California, Berkeley:
    Cluster algebras: an introduction. Read More

Booklet produced for meeting

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Current Events Bulletin Cover 2012
January 6, 2012 (Boston, MA)
  • Jeffrey F. Brock, Brown University:
    Assembling surfaces from random pants: mixing, matching and correcting in the proofs of the surface-subgroup and Ehrenpreis conjectures.
  • Daniel S. Freed, University of Texas at Austin:
    The cobordism hypothesis: quantum field theory + homotopy invariance = higher algebra. Read More
  • Gigliola Staffilani, Massachusetts Institute of Technology:
    Dispersive equations and their role beyond PDE.
  • Umesh Vazirani, University of California, Berkeley:
    How does quantum mechanics scale?

Booklet produced for meeting

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Current Events Bulletin Cover 2011
January 8, 2011 (New Orleans, LA)
  • Luca Trevisan:
    Khot's Unique Games Conjecture: Its consequences and the evidence for and against. Read More
  • Thomas Scanlon:
    Counting special points: logic, Diophantine geometry and transcendence theory. Read More
  • Ulrike Tillmann:
    Spaces of graphs and surfaces. Read More
  • David Nadler:
    The Geometric Nature of the Fundamental Lemma. Read More

Booklet produced for meeting

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Current Events Bulletin Cover 2010
January 15, 2010 (San Francisco, CA)
  • Ben J. Green, University of Cambridge, UK:
    Approximate groups and their applications: work of Bourgain, Gamburd, Helgott and Sarnak.
  • David G. Wagner, University of Waterloo:
    Multivariate stable polynomials: theory and applications. Read More
  • Laura DeMarco, University of Illinois at Chicago:
    The conformal geometry of billiards. Read More
  • Michael Hopkins, Harvard University:
    On the Kervaire Invariant Problem.

Booklet produced for meeting

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Current Events Bulletin Cover 2009
January 7, 2009 (Washington, DC)
  • Matthew James Emerton, Northwestern University:
    Topology, representation theory and arithmetic: Three-manifolds and the Langlands program.
  • Olga Holtz, University of California, Berkeley:
    Compressive sensing: A paradigm shift in signal processing.
  • Michael Hutchings, University of California, Berkeley:
    From Seiberg-Witten theory to closed orbits of vector fields: Taubes's proof of the Weinstein conjecture. Read More
  • Frank Sottile, Texas A & M University:
    Frontiers of reality in Schubert calculus. Read More

Booklet produced for meeting

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Current Events Bulletin Cover 2008
January 8, 2008 (San Diego, California)
  • Gü Uhlmann, University of Washington:
    Invisibility. Read More
  • Antonella Grassi, University of Pennsylvania:
    Birational Geometry: Old and New. Read More
  • Gregory F. Lawler, University of Chicago:
    Conformal Invariance and 2-d Statistical Physics. Read More
  • Terence C. Tao, University of California, Los Angeles:
    Why are Solitons Stable? Read More

Booklet produced for meeting

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Current Events Bulletin Cover 2007
January 7, 2007 (New Orleans, Louisiana)
  • Robert Ghrist, University of Illinois:
    Barcodes: The Persistent Topology of Data. Read More
  • Akshay Venkatesh, Courant Institute, New York University:
    Flows on the Space of Lattices: work of Einsiedler, Katok and Lindenstrauss. Read More
  • Izabella Laba, University of British Columbia:
    From Harmonic Analysis to Arithmetic Combinatorics. Read More
  • Barry Mazur, Harvard University:
    The Structure of Error Terms in Number-Theory and an Introduction to the Sato-Tate Conjecture. Read More

Booklet produced for meeting

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Current Events Bulletin Cover 2006
January 14, 2006 (San Antonio, Texas)
  • Lauren Ancel Myers, University of Texas at Austin:
    Contact network epidemiology: Bond percolation applied to infectious disease prediction and control. Read More
  • Kannan Soundararajan, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor:
    Small gaps between prime numbers. Read More
  • Madhu Sudan, MIT:
    Probabilistically checkable proofs. Read More
  • Martin Golubitsky, University of Houston:
    Symmetry in neuroscience.

Booklet produced for meeting

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Current Events Bulletin Cover 2005
January 7, 2005 (Atlanta, Georgia)
  • Bryna Kra, Northwestern University:
    The Green-Tao Theorem on primes in arithmetic progression: A dynamical point of view. Read More
  • Robert McEliece, California Institute of Technology:
    Achieving the Shannon Limit: A progress report.
  • Dusa McDuff, SUNY at Stony Brook:
    Floer theory and low dimensional topology. Read More
  • Jerrold Marsden and Shane Ross, California Institute of Technology:
    New methods in celestial mechanics and mission design. Read More
  • László Lovász, Microsoft Corporation:
    Graph minors and the proof of Wagner's conjecture. Read More

Booklet produced for meeting

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Current Events Bulletin Cover 2004
January 9, 2004 (Phoenix, Arizona)
  • Margaret H. Wright, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University:
    The interior-point revolution in optimization: History, recent developments, and lasting consequences. Read More
  • Thomas C. Hales, University of Pittsburgh:
    What is motivic integration? Read More
  • Andrew Granville, Université de Montréal:
    It is easy to determine whether or not a given integer is prime. Read More
  • John W. Morgan, Columbia University:
    Perelman's recent work on the classification of 3-manifolds. Read More

Booklet produced for meeting

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No cover image available
January 17, 2003 (Baltimore, Maryland)
  • Michael J. Hopkins, MIT:
    Homotopy theory of schemes.
  • Ingrid Daubechies, Princeton University:
    Sublinear algorithms for sparse approximations with excellent odds.
  • Edward Frenkel, University of California, Berkeley:
    Recent advances in the Langlands Program. Read More
  • Daniel Tataru, University of California, Berkeley:
    The wave maps equation. Read More

No booklet produced for meeting

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