Paco's Home Page

Francisco Santos Leal
What's this Leal about?

I am a professor of Mathematics at the Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, in the University of Cantabria. My address is

Departamento de Matemáticas, Estadística y Computación
Universidad de Cantabria, Av. de los Castros 48
E-39005 Santander, SPAIN

http://personales.unican.es/santosf
Tel: +34 942 20.15.22,  Fax: +34 942 20.14.02
f r a n c i s c o . s a n t o s @ u n i c a n . e s

Research Papers and
a couple of Talks

I recently disproved the
Hirsch conjecture

My book on triangulations,
published in 2010

Research areas:

Discrete and combinatorial geometry (oriented matroids, lattice polytopes, convex polytopes in general, triangulations of them)
Computational geometry (Delaunay triangulations, pseudo-triangulations)
Algebraic geometry (toric geometry, topology of real algebraic plane curves, decomposition of polynomials in sums of squares)

My CV (in the official spanish ministry format, in Spanish. Last updated July 2012)

I work mostly with people in the groups Discrete and differential geometry and Computational Algebra and Geometry of my department.

Some current and past activities:

Since September 2010 I am a member of the Scientific Committee of the Royal Spanish Mathematical Society.
Since 2008 I am Vicedean of the Faculty of Sciences, in charge of coordinating the Degree in Mathematics of my University.
Since 2010 I am also coordinating the Doctorate program Mathematics and Computation, which was distinguished by the Spanish Science Ministry with an "Excellence Mention".
In 2008-2010 I was the director of the International Center for Matehmatics Meetings (CIEM) in Castro Urdiales.
In 2008-2011 I was a member of the steering committee of the i-MATH project.
I am or have been involved in the organization of the following workshops:
- I am a member of the Scientific Committee in the 2013 Annual Congress of the Royal Spanish Mathematical Society. I am also coorganizing a Discrete Math session in the congress.
- Triangulations, an Oberwolfach workshop that took place in May 2012, coorganized with William H. Jaco (Stillwater), Frank H. Lutz (Berlin), and John M. Sullivan (Berlin).
- Jornadas de Matemática Discreta y Algorítmica (Castro Urdiales, July 7-9 2010).
- Real Geometry, Computer Algebra and Math Education, in honor of Tomás Recio (Castro Urdiales, May 17-21 2010).
- International Fall Workshop on Geometry and Physics (Castro Urdiales, September 3-6 2008).
- Workshop on Geometric and Topological Combinatorics (Alcalá de Henares, 31 August-5 September, 2006). This was a satellite conference of ICM2006.
- XIII Encuentro de Topología (Santander, November 2006). A Spanish meeting on Topology.
- XI Encuentros de Geometría Computacional (Santander, 27-29 June, 2005). A Spanish meeting on Computational Geometry.
- Algebraic and Geometric Combinatorics (Crete, 20-26 August, 2005). This was part of a series of Euroconferences on Mathematics in Crete.
- Some pages related to the MSRI Summer School on Triangulations of point sets, that I organized in July 2003 jointly with Jesús A. de Loera and Jörg Rambau. This was one of the early steps in our writing of this book
I was in charge of the Erasmus/Socrates program in Mathematics in my university until May 2003.
I was visiting the Math Department of University of California Davis in 2007-2008. My web there was http://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~santos.
Spanish version of Maths Thesaurus, an online multilingual Mathematics dictionary for primary and secondary school.
These were some useful (at least for me) links. But I have not updated this since around 2000; click only if you are interested in web archeology...

These are my two youngest collaborators. Click on the pictures to see them as they deserve.