Étale Fundamental Groups Learning Seminar

The étale fundamental groups learning seminar is taking place in the autumn semester of the 2026/27 academic year, beginning 8th October 2026. 

This will mainly be following Section 5 of Tamás Szamuely's book "Galois Groups and Fundamental Groups", but we're not doing anything extremely specialised so any reference should work. 

We're meeting Thursdays at 1pm in J11 Hicks (starting 8th Oct). The rough talk timeline is:

1. 08/10/26 Motivation and examples (Mark)

2. 15/10/26 Schemes and morphisms (Diego)

3. 22/10/26 π_1 as an automorphism group (Pierre-Louis)

4. 29/10/26 Geometric points as basepoints and the definition of π_1^{et} (Brais)

5. 05/11/26 Étale deck transformations and pro-objects (Matt)

6. 12/11/26 Some interesting examples (Matt)

7. 19/11/26 Galois theory for fét covers (Hao)

8. 26/11/26 Outer Galois actions (Mark)

Notes should be updated a little bit after each talk (I need some time to write them). Here's the abstract list: