Fitness, Apprenticeship, and Polynomials

This article discusses the design of the Apprenticeship Program at the Fields Institute, held 21 August - 3 September 2016. Six themes from combinatorial algebraic geometry were selected for the two weeks: curves, surfaces, Grassmannians, convexity, abelian combinatorics, parameters and moduli. The activities were structured into fitness, research and scholarship. Combinatorics and concrete computations with polynomials (and theta functions) empowers young scholars in algebraic geometry, and it helps them to connect with the historic roots of their field. We illustrate our perspective for the threefold obtained by blowing up six points in $mathbb{P}^3$.