30.09.19 – EPFL Professor Zsolt Patakfalvi has received a starting grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to work on the classification of varieties.

The ERC Starting Grants are given each year to researchers of any nationality and in any field of research with 2-7 years of research experience after the completion of their PhD and who show a promising scientific track record, and offer an excellent research proposal. Applications must come from an EU or associated country, and each Starting Grant can be up to €1.5 million given over a period of five years, with an additional €1 million to cover specific “start-up” costs.

This year, one of the ERC Starting grants has bee awarded to Zsolt Patakfalvi, who holds the Chair of Algebraic Geometry at EPFL’s Institute of Mathematics.

The awarded project is titled: Moduli spaces of stable varieties and applications. Over the course of five years, Patakfalvi will work on an important part of the classification theory of algebraic geometry. This theory classifies “varieties”, which are the main objects of algebraic geometry, and which can be defined as common zero sets of polynomials. The moduli space of stable varieties is then the list of the most numerous class of elementary varieties to which all other varieties can be decomposed.

The fundamental objective of Patakfalvi’s project is to “construct the coarse moduli space of stable surfaces with fixed volume over the integers (possibly excluding finitely many primes, not depending on the volume)”. The main goal of the project is to find applications for the general algebraic geometry and arithmetic of higher dimensional varieties.