Pure Math Colloquium

Monday, April 1, 2019 4:00 pm - 4:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Jan Minac, University of Western Ontario

"The 13th mysterious room of a palace of absolute Galois groups"

When one enters a palace of absolute Galois groups, one is struck by its beauty and its imposing architecture, and by rooms filled with number theory, anabelian geometry, rich textures of group theory, representation theory, quadratic forms, and Galois cohomology. Even in the spacious corridors of this palace, one sees some remarkable achievements of great mathematicians. However the most mysterious, most magical, and most promising and interesting room cannot yet be fully opened. Several keys such as the Massey key, the Koszul key, the Bloch-Kato key, and the Rost-Voevodsky key, have succeeded in obtaining a 'sneak peak' yielding a spectacular view into the front parts of this room.

In this talk we consider the possibility of using all of these keys and perhaps some additional keys as well, in a simultaneous, organized effort to open all of the doors at once and burst into the middle of the entire room in order to capture its splendor at once.

This talk is based upon the work of a number of mathematicians including my joint work with S. K. Chebolu, I. Efrat, P. Guillot, Ch. Hall, M. Palaisti, F. W. Pasini, C. Quadrelli, N. D. Tan, A. Topaz, and O. Wittenberg.

MC 5501