The Interplay of Algebra and Geometry in the Setting of Regular Algebras

Abstract: This article is based on a talk given by the author at MSRI in the workshop "Connections for Women" in January 2013, while being a part of the program "Noncommutative Algebraic Geometry and Representation Theory" at MSRI. One purpose of the exposition is to motivate and describe the geometric techniques introduced by M. Artin, J. Tate and M. Van den Bergh in the 1980s at a level accessible to graduate students. Additionally, some advances in the subject since the early 1990s are discussed, including a recent generalization of complete intersection to the noncommutative setting, and the notion of graded skew Clifford algebra and its application to classifying quadratic regular algebras of global dimension at most three. The article concludes by listing some open problems.