Events

Pure Mathematics Department, University of Waterloo

Matthew Beckett

“The geometry of Yang-Mills fields, Part 01”

Throughout the spring 2013 term, we will (as a group) be reading through and lecturing on ”The Geometry of Yang-Mills Fields” by Sir Michael Atiyah. All are welcome to attend.

Jason Bell, Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo

"Gromov's theorem IX: solvable linear groups, continued"

We finish the proof that groups of invertible matrices with the property that all of the eigenvalues of each element are roots of unity.

Robert Garbary, Pure Mathematics University of Waterloo

“Roadmap and the basics”

Abelian varieties are the algebraic equivalent of compact lie groups - they are complete (=compact) varieties with morphisms turning them into groups. Besides being interesting in their own right, they have played a major role in number theory and the theory of curves in the last 75 years.

Richard Wentworth, University of Maryland

"The Yang-Mills flow on Kaehler manifolds"

Abstract: TBA

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.

Artane Siad

“The geometry of Yang-Mills fields, Part 02”

Throughout the spring 2013 term, we will (as a group) be reading through and lecturing on ”The Geometry of Yang-Mills Fields” by Sir Michael Atiyah. All are welcome to attend.

Nikolai Vavilov, St. Petersburg

“The Yoga of Commutators (joint work with Roozbeh Hazrat, Alexei Stepanov and Zuhong Zhang)”

In an abstract group, an element of the commutator subgroup is not necessarily a commutator. However, the famous Ore conjecture, recently completely settled by Ellers—Gordeev and by Liebeck—O’Brien—Shalev—Tiep, asserts that any element of a finite simple group is a single commutator.

David Farmer, American Institute of Mathematics

“L-functions: finding, calculating, and using them”

Many objects in number theory and related areas are associated to L-functions. Examples include algebraic varieties, automorphic representations, Galois representations, and modular forms. I will discuss what L-functions can tell us about other objects, and what those objects can tell us about L-functions.

Richard Garbary, Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo

“More about completeness”

Last time we discussed our algebraic analogue of compactness. More precisely, a variety V over a field k is said to be complete (over k) if for all varieties W over k, the map V ×W → W is closed.

Stanley Burris, Pure Math Department, University of Waterloo

"Early Days in the Faculty of Mathematics"

In January, 1967, the oversized Department of Mathematics in  
the Faculty of Arts started a new life, as the Faculty of Mathematics,  
complete with its now famous five departments of mathematics. The  
1960s was an exceptionally glorious time for academic  
institutions---there was nothing like it before, and nothing like it