Daniel Pareja, Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo
"Friable Numbers"
In 1930 Karl Dickman proved a promptly-forgotten result about numbers all of whose prime factors are small. The result was rediscovered in future years, by Chowla and Vijayaraghavan in 1947, and in 1949 independently by Buchstab and Ramaswami, and studied further by Nicolaas de Bruijn in 1951 and 1956. We will examine this result and see how its proof leads us quite naturally to examine a rather unexpected object.