Seminar on rational points on modular elliptic curves

Organiser: Henri Darmon

Meeting time: Wednesday 10:30-12:30.
Room: BH 1120.

Office hours: By appointment.

Syllabus:

This is a continuation of last semester's seminar and will be based on the notes of my NSF-CBMS lectures on Rational Points on Modular Elliptic Curves which I gave in Orlando, Florida, in August 2001.

The notes consist of 10 chapters of roughly equal length. We will start with the last part of chapter 2, and I anticipate we will devote roughly two weeks to each chapter. The seminar particpants will lecture, and fill in necessary background as they see fit.

Note that this is a seminar, not an official course. Hence it has no official number and is not taken for credit. Any graduate student intending to work with me should participate (actively) in the seminar, and could get credit for her or his work (and receive a grade) by registering for a reading course with me.

Text:

The main text will be my lecture notes, a preliminary draft of which can be dowloaded in from my publications page.

A hint for saving paper: The file is currently 127 pages.
In order to save paper, you might want to adopt the following procedure:
after storing the file cbms.ps on your machine, type the command

xpp cbms.ps

from the Unix prompt. Then choose the option
"Two pages per sheet" from the "scaled down printing" menu.
This will put two pages of notes onto one page, and the resolution is still quite reasonable.
If you have good eyes, you can also select 4 pages per sheet.
Combine this with a two-sided printer, and you can get the entire notes to fit onto 15 sheets of paper!