Mathematics Colloquium

All colloquia are on Fridays at 4:00 pm in Van Vleck B239, unless otherwise indicated.

Spring 2018

date	speaker	title	host(s)
January 29 (Monday)	Li Chao (Columbia)	Elliptic curves and Goldfeld's conjecture	Jordan Ellenberg
February 2	Thomas Fai (Harvard)	TBA	Spagnolie, Smith
February 9	Wes Pegden (CMU)	TBA	Roch
March 16	Anne Gelb (Dartmouth)	TBA	WIMAW
April 4 (Wednesday)	John Baez (UC Riverside)	TBA	Craciun
April 6	Reserved	TBA	Melanie
April 13	Jill Pipher (Brown)	TBA	WIMAW
April 25 (Wednesday)	Hitoshi Ishii (Waseda University) Wasow lecture	TBA	Tran
date	person (institution)	TBA	hosting faculty
date	person (institution)	TBA	hosting faculty
date	person (institution)	TBA	hosting faculty
date	person (institution)	TBA	hosting faculty
date	person (institution)	TBA	hosting faculty
date	person (institution)	TBA	hosting faculty
date	person (institution)	TBA	hosting faculty
date	person (institution)	TBA	hosting faculty
date	person (institution)	TBA	hosting faculty

Spring Abstracts

Li Chao

January 29: Li Chao (Columbia)

Title: Elliptic curves and Goldfeld's conjecture

Abstract: An elliptic curve is a plane curve defined by a cubic equation. Determining whether such an equation has infinitely many rational solutions has been a central problem in number theory for centuries, which lead to the celebrated conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer. Within a family of elliptic curves (such as the Mordell curve family y^2=x^3-d), a conjecture of Goldfeld further predicts that there should be infinitely many rational solutions exactly half of the time. We will start with a history of this problem, discuss our recent work (with D. Kriz) towards Goldfeld's conjecture and illustrate the key ideas and ingredients behind these new progresses.