COGENT is a European Doctoral Network, funded by the European Commission (EC) as part of the MSCA programme and by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

Network coordinator: Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA).

Academic EU beneficiaries: Stichting Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUA), Technische Universität Braunschweig (TUB), Université de Bordeaux (UBx), University of Galway.

Academic UK beneficiaries: University of Durham, University of Sheffield (UFSD).

Partner organizations worldwide: Colorado State University (CSU), University of Massachusetts (UMASS), University of Michigan, University of North Carolina-Greensboro (UNCG), University of Oklahoma, ID Quantique (IDQ, Switzerland), MSM Programming (Croatia).

The COGENT project (Cohomology, Geometry, Explicit Number Theory) will advance the state of the art in an active area of interplay between algebra, geometry and computer science. It aims to promote game changing approaches to explicit and exact calculations underlying longstanding conjectures in number theory.

COGENT has the ambition to stimulate interdisciplinary and intersectorial knowledge exchange between number theorists, algebraists, geometers, computer scientists and industrial actors facing real-life challenges in symbolic computation in order to bridge key knowledge gaps. To this end, the project will address the urgent need for computer assisted investigations of several longstanding number-theoretic conjectures, and EU industry’s need for workers with an advanced mathematical and computational skill set.

COGENT brings together international experts with relevant diverse and complementary expertise in mathematical and computational techniques. They will work on topics such as the development of methods for the efficient application of the cohomological machinery to various classes of arithmetic groups and applications to number theory. COGENT will broaden theoretical knowledge aimed at extending the scope of computer aided symbolic and exact calculations, with a view to potential industrial applications in disparate areas ranging from cryptography to applied topological data analysis. The project will contribute new blood to, and help maintain the critical mass of, the research community underpinning and reliant on EU supported open source scientific software such as GAP and Pari/GP. The main training goal of the project is to form a new generation of young researchers with a unique expertise, including high performance computations in geometry and topology, machine learning and quantum computing techniques.

The training will incorporate innovative boot camps, exposure to new research collaborations, and a wide-range of transferable skills.

The project consists of a relatively large consortium (5 academic EU beneficiaries, 2 academic UK beneficiaries funded by UKRI and 7 partner organizations).

Beneficiaries provide supervision of at least one Doctoral candidate project, while the Partner Organisations provide co-supervision, secondments, short visits or training.

The members of the COGENT network are experienced supervisors with more than 90 successful PhD students supervised working either in academia, in the public sector or in industry. Moreover, they have been part of more than 200 PhD committees and been involved in more than 50 PhDs as referees. 

Doctoral candidates will participate in a range of online seminars, in-person workshops, conferences and other training activities organised as part of this COGENT Doctoral Network.