I am writing this blag post from the second annual meeting of the DFG priority programme SPP1489 (algorithmic and experimental methods in algebra, geometry and number theory). Apart from having a lot of fun, I am catching up on the recent developments in open-source computer algebra software. Do you want to know more?
I handed in my diplom thesis today. I'm fairly proud of it, and I am also quite fond of the layout. So, if anyone finds it quite appealing, I am gladly willing to share the LaTeX. Note that although it has (to have) a German introduction, it is written in English.
The term *ramification* was the one that had befuddled me longer than most others, in my studies of algebraic geometry. Let's take a morphism $\pi:Y\to X$ of schemes, and let us assume that it is finite and surjective. We will call a morphism of this kind a **covering** and although I am not sure whether this terminology is standard, I think it's very appropriate. Here, I document some notes I took to connect the various results from several books I know. It helped me to get a better idea and better tools to work with coverings. Do you want to know more?