University of Lethbridge

A power series f(x1,…,xm)∈C[[x1,…,xm]] is said to be D-finite if all the partial derivatives of f span a finite dimensional vector space over the field C(x1,…,xm). For the univariate series f(x)=∑anxn, this is equivalent to the condition that the...

The blow up of the anticanonical base point on X, a del Pezzo surface of degree 1, gives rise to a rational elliptic surface E with only irreducible fibers. The sections of minimal height of E are in correspondence with the 240 exceptional curves on...

It is an open question of Baker whether the Dirichlet L-values at 1 with fixed modulus are linearly independent over the rational numbers. The best-known result is due to Baker, Birch and Wirsing, which affirms this when the modulus of the associated...

In 1896, the prime number theorem was established, showing that π(x) ∼ li(x). Perhaps the most widely used estimates in explicit analytic number theory are bounds on |π(x)-li(x)| or the related error term |θ(x)-x|. In this talk we discuss methods one...

In his famous '86 paper, Andrews made several conjectures on the function σ(q) of Ramanujan, including that it has coefficients (which count certain partition-theoretic objects) whose sup grows in absolute value, and that it has infinitely many...

It is a classical problem to understand the set of Jacobians of curves among all abelian varieties, i.e., the image of the map Mg→Ag which sends a curve X to its Jacobian JX. In characteristic p, Ag has interesting filtrations, and we can ask how the...

In 1944, Linnik showed that the least prime in an arithmetic progression given by a mod q for (a,q)=1 is at most cq^L for some absolutely computable constants c and L. A lot of work has gone in computing explicit bounds for c and L. The best known...

TBC

The prime number theorem (PNT) gives us the density of primes amongst the natural numbers. We can extend this idea to consider whether we have the asymptotic number of primes predicted by the PNT in a given interval. Currently, this has only been...

Pro-p groups arise naturally in number theory as quotients of absolute Galois groups over number fields. These groups are quite mysterious. During the 60's, Koch gave a presentation of some of these quotients. Furthermore, around the same period...