Michael Larsen

I am a Professor in the Math Department at Indiana University.

Contact

Department of Mathematics Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405 USA

Phone: FAX: Office: E-mail: Office Hours:

(812) 855-1064 (812) 855-0046 Rawles Hall 303 M9:30-10:30, T12:45-1:45, and by appointment.

Here is my schedule for Spring 2010.

Research

I am interested in various aspects of algebra, especially:

• algebraic number theory
• algebraic geometry
• group theory (finite, finitely generated, compact, or algebraic)
• homological algebra
• algebraic combinatorics
• applied algebra

Here are my papers and preprints. Here they are organized by MSC classification and by coauthor, courtesy of the AMS. Although I prefer chalk, recently I have given a few talks with slides.

Teaching

• Math S312, Honors Calculus IV.
• Some course information from past years is available here.
• The following is intended as a roadmap for graduate courses which the algebra group expect to offer regularly in the future.
• The Bloomington Math Circle meets Thursdays at 4:30 P.M.

Advising

My advisor was Gerd Faltings. He is descended in five steps from Felix Klein, in eight steps from Gauss, and in ten steps from Euler. (My thanks to The Mathematics Genealogy Project for the historical information.)

Former Ph. D students: Michael Movshev (University of Pennsylvania, 1997), Brad Emmons (2003), Bo-Hae Im (2004), and Daniel Jordan (2006).

Current Ph. D. students: Seongho Cho, Corey Manack, Neeraj Kashyap, Christopher Thornhill.

Tier 3 student: Chun Yin Hui.

Putnam

The Putnam Competition is an annual national collegiate math competition. Next year's competition will be held Saturday, December 4, 2010. If you are interested in competing, you should contact me. You may also be interested in taking Math M491, a problem-solving course inspired by the Putnam Competition. John Scholes' excellent mathematics competition page is no longer available on the web, but it can still be accessed thanks to the Wayback Machine. Putnam problems and solutions can also be found on the web on still-active sites, for instance here.

I served on the Putnam Committee for three years, submitting the following problems:

1996: A4, B3, B5, B6
1997: A3, A4, A5, B2, B4, B5
1998: A3, A6, B4, B5 (actually due to Kamal Khuri-Makdisi), B6
1999: B2

These problems never made prime time, and here are sketches of solutions.

Last changed 2/3/2010.