Celebrating Prof. Gerd Faltings' Abel Prize

Join us for an afternoon celebrating Gerd Faltings’ Abel Prize!

• Scenes from the Abel Ceremony

• Talk by Michael Rapoport

Title: Faltings and the future of the Verlinde formula

• Piano recital by Sun Woo Park: Piano Sonata no.21 in C Major, op.53, 3rd movement, by Ludwig v. Beethoven

• Talk by Peter Scholze

Title: Faltings' almost mathematics: from p-adic Hodge theory to symplectic geometry and beyond

Abstract: In his work in p-adic Hodge theory, Faltings introduced a method of systematically ignoring certain "small" modules, giving rise to the notion of "almost modules"; the circle of ideas is often referred to as "almost mathematics". I will briefly recall the motivation and basic definitions of the theory, and then discuss some applications in different areas of mathematics. First, Vaintrob used almost modules to give a "mirror-dual" description of the category of sheaves on the topological space S^1, or more general tori; his ideas are closely related to ideas of Tamarkin on the coefficient ring of the Fukaya category. Second, in the theory of log-schemes, a long-standing question is how to define its (logarithmic) K-theory, and whether this is the K-theory of a category of "quasicoherent sheaves on the log-scheme". I will give a proposal for such a category and show that in good cases, the resulting K-theory has the expected shape.