Happy new year all! Here is how I will celebrate the new year.

Jarod Alper will be teaching a course on “Introduction to stacks and moduli” at the University of Washington, and the course website is here: https://sites.math.washington.edu/~jarod/math582C.html

I’m going to attend, and I think this course could be as influential as Martin Olsson’s course on stacks back in the Beforetimes (which was central to his development of his wonderful book). Jarod is allowing me to advertise it here. He told me: “Right now I’ve posted a very lengthy introduction & motivation, which I’ll spend all of about one lecture on. I will be gradually posting (and revising) the notes during the quarter.”

The class meets Mon/Wed 11:30-12:50 (beginning Mon Jan 4, 2021), Pacific time. On the course website, he writes: “If you would like to participate informally in the class, please send me an email at jarod@uw.edu with (1) your name, (2) email address, (3) affiliation (if any), (4) status (e.g. 3rd yr PhD student, postdoc, …), and (5) a one sentence summary of your background in algebraic geometry.”

For Stanford folks: I am strongly recommending that most of my current students attend this (with some exceptions depending on their interests), and also recommending that many of my “maybe-they-are-my-students” consider taking it.