Panama - Costa Rica

Last October Claudio Procesi and I went to Panama and Costa Rica, where we gave a couple of talks on general topics in Algebra. My talk was on "Algebra and the real world". In the same spirit as my talk at the Congress of the Americas in Guanajuato, México this past August the underlying theme of this talk was roughly the question: "Is our world continuous or discrete?"

One could argue that though the world used to look like the former it progressively looks more and more like the latter. Algebra is quintessentially the science of the discrete and its relevance for the real world will only increase with time. (Unfortunately due to some technical problems there is no video of my talk in Guanajuato but you can watch a short interview where I discuss some of this.)

One of the places we visited in Panama was the Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá. You can find some details of our visit here (in Spanish).

In Costa Rica we visited the Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica as well as the Universidad de Costa Rica. At the end of our stay in San José, Claudio and I also participated in a meeting with many representatives of Universities from around Central America on an ongoing discussion to open a regional Doctorate in Physics and Mathematics. The rectors from 22 Universities from 6 countries in the region met to continue to hammer out the details of this important project.