Colloquia scheduled for Tuesdays and Thursdays take place at 4:30-5:30 pm in LN 2205 with refreshments served from 4:00-4:25 pm in the Anderson Memorial Reading Room, while colloquia scheduled for Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays normally take place at 4:40-5:40 pm in LN 2205 with refreshments served from 4:10-4:35 pm in the Anderson Memorial Reading Room.
Unless stated otherwise, colloquia are scheduled for Thursdays.
Here you find some directions to Binghamton University and the Department of Mathematical Sciences.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Dean's Speaker Series in Geometry/Topology
Speaker:
Dinesh Thakur, University of Arizona
Title:
The arithmetic of function fields.
Time:
4:30 - 5:30 pm
Room: LN-2205
Abstract: We will explain what would be analogues of e, pi, gamma(1/7), zeta(3), if integers are replaced by polynomials, and what is know about relations between such special values.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Cross-listed with Geometry-Topology Seminar
Speaker:
Dror Bar-Natan, University of Toronto
Title:
Meta-Groups, Meta-Bicrossed-Products, and the Alexander Polynomial
Time:
2:50 - 3:50 pm Note unusual time!
Room: LH7 (NOTE UNUSUAL ROOM!)
Abstract: The a priori expectation of first year elementary school students who were just introduced to the natural numbers, if they would be ready to verbalize it, must be that soon, perhaps by second grade, they'd master the theory and know all there is to know about those numbers. But they would be wrong, for number theory remains a thriving subject, well-connected to practically anything there is out there in mathematics. I was a bit more sophisticated when I first heard of knot theory. My first thought was that it was either trivial or intractable, and most definitely, I wasn't going to learn it is interesting. But it is, and I was wrong, for the reader of knot theory is often led to the most interesting and beautiful structures in topology, geometry, quantum field theory, and algebra. Today I will talk about just one minor example: A straightforward proposal for a group-theoretic invariant of knots fails if one really means groups, but works once generalized to meta-groups (to be defined). We will construct one complicated but elementary meta-group as a meta-bicrossed-product (to be defined), and explain how the resulting invariant is a not-yet-understood generalization of the Alexander polynomial, while at the same time being a specialization of a somewhat-understood "universal finite type invariant of w-knots" and of an elusive "universal finite type invariant of v-knots". See more details at http://www.math.toronto.edu/~drorbn/Talks/Binghamton-1203/
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Dean's Speaker Series in Geometry/Topology
Speaker:
Cristian Popescu, UC San Diego
Title:
Generalized class number formulas
Time:
4:30 - 5:30 pm
Room: LN-2205
Abstract: The well-known analytic class number formula, linking the special value at s=0 of the Dedekind zeta function of a number field to its class number and regulator has been the foundation and prototype for the highly conjectural theory of special values of L-functions for close to two centuries. We will discuss generalizations of the class number formula to the context of equivariant Artin L-functions, which capture refinements of the Brumer-Stark and Coates-Sinnott conjectures. The generalized formulas relate various algebraic-geometric invariants associated to a global field, e.g. its Quillen K-theory and \'etale cohomology, to various special values of its Galois-equivariant L-functions. This is based on joint work with Banaszak, Dodge and Greither.