K-State Mathematics Department Women Lecture Series - Dressler Lecture
The Kansas State University Department of Mathematics is hosting a Women Lecture Series in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Association for Women in Mathematics. The series includes Distinguished Lectures and colloquium talks by women mathematicians planned throughout 2021. The talks will be streamed live during Spring 2021 and may be streamed live and/or in person during Fall 2021, depending on the circumstances of the pandemic. The talks will be held at 2:30pm-3:20pm Central Time on a Tuesday or a Thursday; there will be time for Q&A at the end of each talk. See Spring 2021 schedule at https://www.math.k-state.edu/events/wls/.
ISIDORE & HILDA DRESSLER LECTURE
LILLIAN PIERCE (Duke University)
Thursday, February 11th, 2021, 2:30pm (Central Time)
Streamed live: https://youtu.be/qPtU9i70PBc
(No registration or sign in needed, unless you would like to ask questions through the chat; in that case, you must login with a gmail account.)
Title: Counting problems: open questions in number theory, from the perspective of moments
Abstract: Many questions in number theory can be phrased as counting problems. How many number fields are there? How many elliptic curves are there? How many integral solutions to this system of Diophantine equations are there? If the answer is “infinitely many,” we want to understand the order of growth for the number of objects we are counting in the “family." But in many settings we are also interested in finer-grained questions, like: how many number fields are there, with fixed degree and fixed discriminant? We know the answer is “finitely many,” but it would have important consequences if we could show the answer is always “very few indeed.” In this accessible talk, we will describe a way that these finer-grained questions can be related to the bigger infinite-family questions. Then we will use this perspective to survey interconnections between several big open conjectures in number theory, related in particular to class groups and number fields.
Lillian Pierce is the Nicholas J. and Theresa M. Leonardy Professor of Mathematics at Duke University. She received her PhD from Princeton in 2009. Subsequently she was a Member and NSF postdoc at the IAS, a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Oxford, and a Bonn Junior Fellow at the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics in Bonn. As a young faculty member, Pierce was awarded an NSF CAREER award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship, the AWM-Sadosky Research Prize, a von Neumann Fellowship, and the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE). Her work is in analytic number theory, harmonic analysis, and their intersection.
To learn more about the Isidore and Hilda Dressler Lecture click here.
For more information about the K-State Mathematics Department Women Lecture Series visit https://www.math.k-state.edu/events/wls/