The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture

David Lilienfeldt

12:00, Friday, Feb. 28
BURN 1025



Good times with Peter and Bryan at Cambridge in the 60's.

Formulated in 1965, the BSD conjecture is one of the Millenium Prize Problems listed by the Clay Mathematics Institute. It has been instrumental to the development of new important branches of algebraic number theory and arithmetic geometry and constitutes today a central pillar for active research in these fields. However, the conjecture remains largely unsolved. Starting from a historical perspective I will present the statement of the conjecture, giving along the way an insight into some of the flavours of modern arithmetic geometry. If time permits, I will briefly mention higher dimensional generalisations of the conjecture, which is the setting of my research.

All graduate students are invited. As with all talks in the graduate student seminar, this talk will be accessible to all graduate students in math and stats.

This seminar was made possible by funding from the McGill mathematics and statistics department and PGSS.

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