An algebraist commuting in Berkeley (Q911656)

This is an overview over recent tendencies of commutative algebra collected by the author at the conference ``Microprogram on commutative algebra'' in Berkeley (1987, June 15th to July 3rd) which was organized by the author, \textit{M. Hochster} and \textit{J. Sally}. After a short history of commutative algebra (Hilbert's Nullstellensatz, invariants, Cohen-Macaulay ring, etc.) the author describes two recent techniques: reduction to characteristic p and investigation of intersection multiplicity of R-modules over a regular local ring R.