About BENDZ: History

This page provides a brief overview of the history of the seminar series.

Most of the historical information has been taken from this website of previous editions.

The, originally, Basel–Dijon–EPFL Joint Seminars is a series of two-day workshops on Algebraic Geometry, held on a biannual basis. It was initially organised between the Institute of Mathematics of the University of Basel and the Institut de Mathématiques de Bourgogne in Dijon.

The series began in Fall 2015, following a first French–Swiss Mini-Workshop held in Dijon in 2014 in the framework of the ANR project “BirPol.” A special additional joint edition, the Mini-Workshop Analytic and Algebraic Geometry, took place in Bern in 2016, in partnership with the Institute of Mathematics of the University of Bern.

Since 2017, the seminar has been organised with a third partner, the Mathematics Section at EPFL in Lausanne, and became known as the Basel–Dijon–EPFL Joint Seminars.

In 2024, the Université de Neuchâtel joined the network, and in 2025, ETH Zürich also became a partner. From that moment on, the seminar adopted the acronym BENDZ, standing for Basel, EPFL, Neuchâtel, Dijon, Zürich.

An overview of the past editions can be found here.
The most recent edition prior to this one took place in April 2025 at EPFL in Lausanne.