People Online In Number Theory
The pandemic has hit early career academics particularly hard, depriving them of valuable speaking and networking opportunities often provided by conferences and seminars. While virtual conferences have helped, we believe there are still gaps to be filled. POINT aims to create an online organizational structure and virtual community to support early career number theorists, particularly those who are not yet in permanent positions. We do this through peer support as well as outreach from more established number theorists. We aspire to create welcoming and inclusive spaces for mathematicians who are historically and currently underrepresented in mathematics, and mathematicians from countries with few mathematical resources. We encourage leadership and feedback from these groups, including changes we can make that bring us closer to this ideal.
Mathematicians from different areas of Number Theory will host these informal sessions. Anyone working in number theory (broadly defined), especially students, are encouraged to participate. Such a session will be an opportunity to discuss various aspects of the profession. Examples include, but are not limited to, math discussions, applying for jobs, preparing grant proposals, promoting diversity and equity.
Our Contributed Talk Series "New Developments in Number Theory" aims to provide a friendly platform for early career researchers working in Number Theory and related areas to share their work. These areas include but are not limited to Algebraic Number Theory, Analytic Number Theory, Algebraic Geometry, Arithmetic Geometry, Commutative Algebra, Representation Theory, Lie Groups and Lie Algebras, Diophantine Geometry, Geometry of Numbers, Tropical Geometry, Arithmetic Dynamics. We strongly encourage graduate students to apply to give a talk.
Acknowledgement:
We are grateful to our friends in the virtual low dimensional topology group for inspiring many of our events. We are also grateful to the organizers of the Algebraic Geometry Discord Server (AGS) for showing us the way while we create our own.
We acknowledge that our academic communities are built on biased foundations that unfairly favor certain groups over others. We especially want the resources and networking opportunities available through POINT to be available to early career number theorists who are Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and/or from countries with few mathematical resources, women, LGBTQ+ mathematicians, and all other groups historically and currently underrepresented in mathematics. We also welcome leadership from such members, to the extent they desire to be involved in such roles.