ESR10 - Tobias Metzlaff

This summer offers several conferences. With MEGA and GO60 already past, I am looking forward to next weeks workshop on algebraic combinatorics of the symmetric groups and coxeter groups. For us, this is the first event since the pandamic, which will not be held virtually. My supervisor Evelyne Hubert and I will have a week of fruitful discussions in Cetraro, Italy. Afterwards, ISSAC 2021 is advancing and we prepare a talk at the Aromath Seminar in the same week. The crowning end of this series of conferences will be the SIAM conference AG21 in August, for which registration is now open.

For the Aromath Seminar in May we have the pleasure of listening to two postdocs: Philippe Moustrou and Navid Nemati . Navid worked at Inria for the duration of last year and it was always great to discuss with him about math and scientific research in general over an occasional coffee. The first time I met Philippe was at the POEMA workshop in Florence and then later during my secondment in Tromso. I'm looking forward to both talks. The next big events will be the MEGA conference in early June and later the second POEMA Learning Week .

With some time left to the next POEMA workshop in June , we the ESRs have weekly informal meetings to learn more details about each others work. Big thanks to our colleague Andries at CWI for sharing his thoughts on term sparsity in his latest blog post and starting the first discussion. After we all absolved the first year of the PhD and with some time to breath until the next conferences in summer, this is a great opportunity to find new collaborations and a possibility to organize a reading course exploring new topics in polynomial optimization. It is a great advantage to have a network with so many active members spreading across Europe.

The Secondment at UiT Tromso with Cordian Riener ended last January. Now I am back in France and we are wrapping up the results of our research. The small team, that formed between the group at Tromso and us will certainly stay in close contact and we are looking forward to work together on future projects. For me personally, the secondment had many benefits as I learned to develop new perspectives on my own work and got to know many new people. This week, we also had the last day of the third POEMA workshop, which took place virtually. We have heard many fascinating talks and learned a lot.

In the last weeks of 2020, my colleagues Viktor Levandovskyy and Karim Abou Zeid from RWTH Aachen and me finished the extended paper of the ISSAC 2020 article and submitted it to the Journal of Symbolic Computation. We are looking forward to receive feedback. The year 2021 continued with our work together with Cordian Riener and Philippe Moustrou, on which a report will appear in the POEMA Newsletter soon. A nice event, that takes place currently, is the meeting Mørketidens Mattemøte organized by UiT for the community of Norwegian mathematicians. Hans Z. Munthe-Kaas will give a talk tomorrow morning on affine Weyl groups and multivariate interpolation, which is of great interest to me.

 This month, I began my secondment in Tromsø at the UiT Norges arktiske universitet together with Cordian Riener . After a ten-days quarantine, I am now able to work from an office in the department of mathematics, where I also met my fellow ESR Sebastian Debus and more people from the algebra research group. Last week we all participated in the POEMA workshop and the following ESR-day. It was a good occasion to see, how far we all got with our research after roughly one year and to find out what the plans for the future are.

This week, we have a visitor in the team: Edgar Fuentes from Artelys, Paris. He is a fellow ESR in the POEMA network and I am sure, that we will have some fruitful discussions. Also, the secondment at UiT Tromsø will start in a few weeks. I hope that the travel situation will remain as it is right now, so I will be able to travel to Norway.