Oswaldo Lezama

Early life and education

Lezama was born in Bucaramanga, Colombia. He studied at the Industrial University of Santander obtaining in 1978 a B.Sc. in Mathematical Education with a Cum Laude mention. In 1976 Lezama received a scholarship to study in the Saint Petersburg State University as part of an agreement between the governments of Colombia and the USSR. His Ph.D. supervisor was Zenon Ivanovich Borevich and the work was titled ″The Group of the Invertible Elements of a Semiperfect Ring″. He obtained the title in 1983.

With time his interest in noncommutative algebra grew until the mentioned seminar changed its name to SAC2 (″Seminario de Álgebra Constructiva″, in Spanish) and the research in such matter started. The first aboarded topics were noncommutative Gröbner basis and homological properties of noncommutative rings. In 2011, with his doctoral student Claudia Gallego, published for the first time the concept of skew PBW extension, which with time became his main topic of research. In 2018 he received public attention when he published in several media an opinion article about the candidature of Sergio Fajardo to the presidency of Colombia.

In 2020, coinciding with his year of retirement of the National University of Colombia, a book called ″Skew PBW Extensions″ was published in the editorial Springer summarizing the results obtained by Lezama and colleagues/students among the years. Another notorious written work of Lezama are the called ″Cuadernos de Álgebra″ consisting on ten monographies (in Spanish) covering the basic topics of undergraduate and graduate abstract algebra, including Galois theory, algebraic geometry and homological algebra.

Selected writings

Zariski cancellation problem for non-domain noncommutative algebras (2017), with Yi Wang and James Zhang Extended modules and Ore extensions (2015), with Vyacheslav Artamonov and William Fajardo Some homological properties of skew PBW extensions (2013), with Armando Reyes Gröbner bases for ideals of σ-PBW extensions (2011), with Claudia Gallego Cuadernos de álgebra