Aside from the ongoing seminar series, SMRI has committed to running yearly themed special semesters. From May to June 2025, Modern perspectives in representation theory ran at SMRI, organised by SMRI Director Geordie Williamson, Charlotte Chan and Thomas Lam (both from the University of Michigan). SMRI was at the epicentre of the mathematical activity around the special semester. For Australian mathematicians, local themed semesters offer another opportunity to collaborate and form connections with the international research community.
To reflect on the highlights, we invited SMRI visitor Masoud Kamgarpour to have a conversation with organisers Charlotte and Thomas about the special semester, their six-month sabbaticals at SMRI, and research in the mathematical sciences. Thomas reflected that, despite inviting a lot of people, there was plenty of time without formal activities, allowing visitors to collaborate and have great conversations over the coffee machine and across other collaboration spaces.
Charlotte noted that, “We had visitors come from a wide range of representation theories from combinatorial to more arithmetic flavour stuff. Most places you go, you don’t see such range all collected in one place at one time. The result is that you go to talks that are not in your usual wheelhouse… I think this is quite special, as it encourages speakers to give a presentation that can be appreciated by a wider audience. In this way, I think as mathematicians, we can strive to understand what each other are doing, and use our expertise to prove other theorems!”
Masoud’s full conversation with Charlotte and Thomas is available on the SMRI YouTube channel.