Jan Draisma

Professor of Mathematics

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Recreational


News

April 2026: I was a guest in Fokus Forschung, a series of interviews about the sciences. Lisa Kattner and I discussed the necessity of curiosity-driven math on the one hand, and of an open eye for applications on the other hand. After that, I illustrated what I do by explaining the notion of Euclidean distance degree for a general audience. You can find a recording of my interview on youtube. It's mostly without image, but in the second half there are two slides explaining the ED degree.

Spring 2026: After a break, we are re-starting the Intercity Seminar.

Fall 2025: My group's new seminar webpage is up.

March 2-March 20, 2026: Bernoulli programme on algebraic aspects of metric and integral geometry. We welcome applications for the school (March 9-13) and registrations for the converence (March 16-20).

3 November 2025: Schläfli lecture by Kathlén Kohn.

Teaching

Discrete Mathematics

This course is taught for the fourth time in Spring 2010, by Benne de Weger and myself. See also the course information and Benne de Weger's page. My half of the course changed dramatically relative to last years; I will now lecture on computations in polynomial rings. This fits better with Benne's topic, and also connects very well with research done in the group of Discrete Algebra and Geometry. My course will be based on the book Ideals, varieties, and algorithms which you can find in the TU/e library, but I will give hand-outs (in Dutch) with the most important definitions and theorems. Roughly we treat the subjects below.
  • Chapter 1 (except par. 3) on polynomial rings, varieties, ideals; here are some notes.
  • Chapter 2 on Gröbner bases and Buchberger's algorithm; here are some notes.
  • Nullstellensatz + applications to combinatorial problems; here are some notes.
  • (A selection of) Chapter 3 on elimination, plus some extra material on Markov bases; here are some notes.
  • A selection of Chapter 9 (on dimension); here are some notes.
  • Some exercises.