The conference “Recent Advances in Algebraic Geometry” was held between May 16 and 19, 2013, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, to honor Robert K. Lazarsfeld (known as “Rob” among friends and colleagues) on the occasion of his 60th birthday. The conference honored Rob's outstanding contributions to algebraic geometry and the mathematical community, bringing together a large crowd, including many of his former students, collaborators, colleagues, and friends. It was a happy occasion for many of us who have known Rob and have been touched by his influence as students and peers, or simply as members of the algebraic geometry world.

From a personal point of view, we cannot even begin to discuss Rob's career without mentioning one of its most distinguished aspects, namely the unique influence he has had on the younger generations through teaching and mentoring. His style as a doctoral advisor and as an expositor is famous throughout the algebraic geometry community. He has been the advisor of more than 20 students, has numerous other mathematical descendants, and has mentored successful postdoctoral fellows. Many of these are now established mathematicians helping to expand the boundaries of Rob's mathematical vision. His generosity and ability to generate good problems, and his active support of the careers of his students, have been for many of us some of the most crucial aspects of our mathematical lives.

We highlight a few reference points in Rob's mathematical career. He received his B.A. from Harvard in 1975, and his Ph.D. from Brown in 1980, under the direction of William Fulton. He then went back to Harvard as a Benjamin Peirce Assistant Professor until 1983. During the 1981–82 academic year, Rob was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the American Mathematical Society, which he used to visit the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton while on leave from Harvard. There he met Lawrence Ein, with whom he would later develop a long-lasting collaboration, resulting in over 25 joint papers. In 1983, Rob moved as an Assistant Professor to UCLA, where he became a Professor in 1987.

In the spring of 2009, the entire MSRI semester was devoted to Algebraic Geometry. The first main workshop, held during the week of January 26-30 and entitled “Classical Algebraic Geometry Today”, served as an introduction to the whole program. It was designed to give a panorama of current progress in the field, of interest to experts, but presented in an introductory manner in order to make it accessible to those with only a general background. As a result, all talks contained a substantial expository and didactic component for the younger audience for whom the workshop was primarily intended.

One of the goals of the workshop was to reflect the diversity of Algebraic Geometry and its most fascinating recent developments. As such, it covered a wide range of topics such as birational geometry and classification, rational curves on algebraic varieties, moduli spaces of abelian varieties, derived categories and Fourier-Mukai transforms, curve counting invariants, holomorphic symplectic manifolds, and Hodge theory. Topics like modern enumerative geometry, moduli of varieties of general type, and combinatorial geometry, although represented at this event as well, were more strongly emphasized at other workshops organized throughout the semester.

The speakers at the workshop were, in alphabetical order: Mark de Cataldo, Olivier Debarre, David Eisenbud, Sam Grushevsky, Christopher Hacon, Joe Harris, Daniel Huybrechts, Jun-Muk Hwang, János Kollár, Robert Lazarsfeld, Alina Marian, Kieran O'Grady, Martin Olsson, Rita Pardini, Giuseppe Pareschi, Richard Thomas, Burt Totaro, and Yuri Tschinkel.

We hope that this volume closely reflects the spirit of the workshop. Intended to give an overview of the state of the art in the field, it is addressed to both beginners and specialists. As one of the fields in mathematics with the longest history, Algebraic Geometry has had an incredible evolution over the past century, with new subfields constantly branching off, with spectacular progress in certain directions, but at the same time, with many fundamental unsolved problems still to be tackled. The focus of the volume is on approaches to long-standing open problems (in other words, problems with a “classical” flavor) by means of modern techniques currently under development. Many of the surveys contain questions and conjectures which will hopefully lead to a flurry of activity and wonderful new results in the future.