Twenty years of the Birch–Swinterton-Dyer conjecture
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Speaker: Andrew Wiles (Oxford)
Speaker: Andrew Wiles (Oxford)
Speaker: Claire Voisin (Collège de France)
Speaker: Ben Green (Oxford)
Correction: the work cited at 1:02:30 is of Richard Bamler.
Speaker: John Morgan (Stony Brook)
Professor Martin R Bridson FRS has been appointed President of the Clay Mathematics Institute from October 1, 2018. He is the Whitehead Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College. Until earlier this summer, he was Head of the Mathematical Institute at Oxford.
He studied mathematics as an undergraduate at Hertford College, Oxford, before moving to Cornell in 1986 for his graduate work. He completed his PhD there in 1991, under the supervision of Karen Vogtmann, with a thesis on Geodesics and Curvature in Metric Simplicial Complexes. After appointments at Princeton and at the University of Geneva, he returned to Oxford in 1993 as a Tutorial Fellow of Pembroke College. In 2002, he moved to Imperial College London as Professor of Mathematics and returned again to Oxford in 2007 as Whitehead Professor. He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2015) and a Fellow of the Royal Society (2016), to which he was elected “for his leading role in establishing geometric group theory as a major field of mathematics”.
Professor Bridson has been recognised for his ground-breaking work on geometry, topology, and group theory in awards from the London Mathematical Society (Whitehead Prize 1999, Forder Lectureship 2005) and from the Royal Society (Wolfson Research Merit Award 2002), and by invitations to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2006 and to give the Abel Prize Lecture in Oslo in 2009.
Congratulations to former Clay Research Fellows Peter Scholze (pictured) and Akshay Venkatesh on the award of Fields Medals at the 2018 ICM in Rio de Janeiro.
Scholze took up his fellowship in 2012, on completing his PhD under the supervision of Michael Rapoport at the Universität Bonn. He was awarded a Fields Medal “for transforming arithmetic algebraic geometry over p-adic fields through his introduction of perfectoid spaces, with application to Galois representations, and for the development of new cohomology theories”.
Image: Peter Scholze at the 2012 Clay Research Conference, Oxford, UK
Venkatesh completed his PhD in 2002 under the supervision of Peter Sarnak at Princeton University. He took up his fellowship in 2004 following a period as C.L.E. Moore Instructor at MIT. He was awarded a Fields Medal “for his synthesis of analytic number theory, homogeneous dynamics, topology, and representation theory, which has resolved long-standing problems in areas such as the equidistribution of arithmetic objects”.
The Queen has approved the appointment of Professor Sir Andrew Wiles as the inaugural holder of the Regius Professorship of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. The Chair was created in 2016 as part of the celebrations of Queen Elizabeth’s 90th birthday. Professor Wiles has been a member of CMI’s Scientific Advisory Board since CMI’s foundation in 1998.
There are only two other Regius Chairs of Mathematics in the UK, at the University of Warwick (first held by Martin Hairer) and at University of St Andrews (first held by James Gregory). The Warwick chair was created in 2013; the one at St Andrews was created by Charles II in 1668.
The book “Ada Lovelace: the Making of a Computer Scientist” by Christopher Hollings, Ursula Martin, and Adrian Rice will be published soon by Bodleian Libraries in the UK and distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the USA. It is a product of a joint project between CMI and the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford.
From the Publishers’ description: “Ada, Countess of Lovelace (1815–1852), daughter of romantic poet Lord Byron and his highly educated wife, Anne Isabella, is sometimes called the world’s first computer programmer and has become an icon for women in technology. But how did a young woman in the nineteenth century, without access to formal school or university education, acquire the knowledge and expertise to become a pioneer of computer science?
Although an unusual pursuit for women at the time, Ada Lovelace studied science and mathematics from a young age. This book uses previously unpublished archival material to explore her precocious childhood, from her ideas for a steam-powered flying horse to penetrating questions about the science of rainbows. A remarkable correspondence course with the eminent mathematician Augustus De Morgan shows her developing into a gifted, perceptive and knowledgeable mathematician. Active in Victorian London’s social and scientific elite alongside Mary Somerville, Michael Faraday and Charles Dickens, Ada Lovelace became fascinated by the computing machines devised by Charles Babbage. The table of mathematical formulae sometimes called the ‘first programme’ occurs in her paper about his most ambitious invention, his unbuilt ‘Analytical Engine’.
Ada Lovelace died at just thirty-six, but her paper still strikes a chord to this day, with clear explanations of the principles of computing, and broader ideas on computer music and artificial intelligence now realised in modern digital computers. Featuring images of the ‘first programme’ and Lovelace’s correspondence, alongside mathematical models, and contemporary illustrations, this book shows how Ada Lovelace, with astonishing prescience, explored key mathematical questions to understand the principles behind modern computing.”
The Director of the Henri Poincaré Instiute (IHP) has announced two new appointments to the Poincaré Chair:
• Paul Bourgade, Associate Professor at New York University (Courant Institute). Bourgade works on probability theory, random matrices, statistical physics, and stochastic analysis.
• Joel Kamnitzer, Professor at University of Toronto (Department of Mathematics). Kamnitzer works on representation theory, algebraic geometry, combinatorial representation theory, knot homology, and categorification.
The Clay Mathematics Institute and IHP established the Poincaré Chair for mathematicians in the early stages of their career. Those named to the chair hold their position at the Institut Henri Poincaré for a term of six months to one year. The Chair is financed for a period of five years with the Clay Millennium Prize funds for resolution of the Poincaré conjecture. The conjecture was solved in the affirmative by Grigoriy Perelman, for which he was awarded the Millennium Prize in 2010. Dr. Perelman subsequently declined to accept the prize money. In establishing this chair with IHP, CMI aims to provide an exceptional opportunity for mathematicians of great promise to develop their ideas and pursue their research, just as Grigoriy Perelman was afforded such an opportunity by a fellowship at the Miller Institute in 1993-95.
The Clay Mathematics Institute is pleased to announce that Aleksandr Logunov and Will Sawin have been awarded Clay Research Fellowships.
Aleksandr Logunov gained his PhD in 2015 under the supervision of Viktor Havin at the Chebyshev Laboratory, St Petersburg State University. After two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Tel-Aviv University, he moved last year to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He will hold his Clay Research Fellowship at Princeton University.
Will Sawin obtained his PhD in 2016 from Princeton University, under the supervision of Nicholas Katz. Since then he has worked with Emmanuel Kowalski as a Junior Fellow at ETH Zürich.
Clay Research Fellowships are awarded on the basis of the exceptional quality of candidates’ research and their promise to become mathematical leaders.
The Clay Mathematics Institute will celebrate the 20th anniversary of its foundation with a conference in the Andrew Willes Building at Oxford, from 24 to 26 Sepetmber 2018.
The conference will celebrate CMI’s contributions to the international mathematical community over the past 20 years and highlight the outstanding work of some of the mathematicians whose research it has supported.
Speakers: Manjul Bhargava, Ben Green, Elon Lindenstrauss, John Morgan, Ngô Bảo Châu, Peter Scholze, Stanislav Smirnov, Terence Tao, Claire Voisin, Andrew Wiles.