PRIMER SERIES
Friday, 23 May 2014
4.10pm
Erskine 031

Brendan Creutz (School of Mathematics & Statistics, UC)

Title: Numerical Evidence for the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture

Abstract
There is a US$1,000,000 reward for a correct proof (or disproof) of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. Developed in the 1960s, the conjecture posits a remarkable relationship between the number of solutions to certain diophantine equations and special values of a related complex analytic function. The talk will describe the conjecture and some of the evidence amassed in support of it.
ALL WELCOME
Primers URL: http://www.math.canterbury.ac.nz/primers.shtml