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.