Prof. Dr. James McKernan

University of California
Mathematics/Algebraic Geometry

External Senior Fellow
July 2014 – August 2014

Last Update: 31.08.2014

Curriculum Vitae

James McKernan joined the UCSD mathematics faculty as professor in 2012, following faculty appointments at MIT, 2007-present, and UCSB 1195-2007. He received his B.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1985, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1991, under the direction of Joseph Harris. He was subsequently appointed an instructor at the University of Utah and the University of Texas. He was a Visiting Assistant Professorship at the Oklahoma State University from 1994-95. Professor McKernan’s research interests are in algebraic geometry.

Professor McKernan holds a Charles Lee Powell Endowed Chair in Mathematics at the University of California, San Diego. Before that he was the Norbert Wiener Professor of Mathematics (2009) at MIT. He received the Clay Mathematics Research Award in 2007. With Christopher Hacon, he was awarded the Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Algebra by the AMS in 2009. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (2011).

Selected Publications

Existence of minimal models for varieties of log general type. I, with C. Birkar, P. Cascini,
C. Hacon, J. Amer. Math. Soc. 2010, Vol 23, no. 2. (405-468).
Existence of minimal models for varieties of log general type. II, with C. Hacon, J. Amer.
Math. Soc. 2010, Vol 23, no. 2. (469-490).
Boundedness of pluricanonical maps, with C. Hacon, Inv. Math., October 2006, Vol 166, no 1. (1-25).
On Shokurov’s rational connectedness conjecture, with C. Hacon, Duke Math. J. 2007, Vol
138, no. 1. (119-136).
On the birational automorphisms of varieties of general type, with C. Hacon and C. Xu, Ann. of Math.,
Ann. of Math. (2) 177 (2013), no. 3, 1077–1111.

FRIAS Project

The birational classification of algebraic varieties.

Algebraic geometry is the study of systems of polynomial equations. The minimal model program is an ambitious program to find easy ways to present the solutions to polynomial equations. The main goals of the project are to show that there are only finitely many types of Fano varieties in each dimension and to establish the existence of minimal models.