Mauricio Velasco

Mauricio Velasco’s research area is applied algebraic geometry. His main areas of interest are the relationship between classical algebraic geometry and other fields: initially combinatorics, commutative algebra and symbolic computation and lately also optimization and control, complexity theory and machine learning.

Mauricio was born in Bogotá, Colombia. He studied pure mathematics at Universidad de los Andes, one of the countries two main institutions. He obtained a PhD in Mathematics from Cornell University in 2007 under the direction of Mike Stillman. After this he went to UC Berkeley as a Morrey Assistant professor under the supervision of David Eisenbud and Bernd Sturmfels. After a brief period in finance (with Goldman Sachs international in London) Mauricio returned to Colombia to become an Assistant professor at the Department of Mathematics of Universidad de los Andes. Since 2013 he has been an Associate Professor at this same institution, where he has the fortune of an extraordinarily talented group of students.

Mauricio was introduced to the problems and importance of nonlinear algebra by Bernd Sturmfels. He is very glad to be a part of this broad research group.