Graduate Students

Rob Brown, MSc ’88, studied Weyl groups in a variety of situations. After graduating, Rob went to work for Nortel in Belleville.

Nondas Kechagias, PhD ’90, studied the rings of invariants of parabolic subgroups of Gl(V) – these are groups lying between the Borel group and the full group. They all turn out to have polynomial rings of invariants when acting on k[V]. Nondas was also able to describe their rings of invariants when these groups act on a polynomial tensor exterior algebra – this sort of thing helps build a link between traditional invariant theory and algebraic topology. Nondas returned to his alma mater in Ioannina, Greece where he is now an associate professor.

Catherine Chambers, MSc ’96, studied invariants of the four and five dimensional indecomposable representations of the cyclic group of order p for the primes 3 and 5 in the summer of 1996. Her work later led Jim Shank to understand these representations at all primes leading to his paper "SAGBI bases for formal modular semi-invariants". Catherine now has a job with Nanometrics, an engineering firm designing geo-technical instruments in Ottawa.

David Giordano, MSc ’00, studied a beautiful paper of R P Stanley’s on Complete Intersection Algebras in characteristic 0. David went on to a job at Altran, an engineering and technology firm, based in Paris, France. He has since decided to do a MSc in the Mathematics of Finance.

Chuai Jianjun, PhD ’03, studied those rings of invariants in characteristic p which have Cohen-Macaulay rings of invariants. He has produced some very nice results: suppose G is a p-group that has a polynomial ring of invariants when acting on the coordinate ring of V, what can we say about the structure of the ring of invariants of G acting diagonally on the coordinate ring of 2V. He is now working as a PDF at Queen’s.

Chris Brav, MSc ’03, joined the Invariant Theory Group in the Fall of ’02. His project was to examine some of the elementary theorems of commutative algebra (those needed for invariant theory) over rings instead of fields, for example over the integers or the integers with some primes inverted, perhaps with a root of unity attached. We expect this work will have applications to non-modular invariant theory.

Yinglin Wu, PhD, joined us in the Fall of ’02. Yinglin is near completing his breadth requirements, and we will think about a suitable problem.

Letitia Banu, PhD, joined us in Winter ’03. Letitia is settling in just now.

Emilie Dufresne, MSc, joined us in Fall ’03.

March 14, 2004.