Two weeks at Waterloo guest lecture

Julia Gordon, University of British Columbia

"The strange world of p-adic numbers"

This talk will be about the fields of p-adic numbers -- which, like the
real numbers, are completions of the rationals, but with respect to a
different metric -- the metric that  reflects divisibility by a prime p.
We will see some very strange effects caused by this unusual metric,  do
some arithmetic and some algebra in these fields, and then get a glimpse
of  the role p-adic numbers play in modern number theory -- and in
particular, how they relate to elliptic curves.