This year's Mahler Lecturer is Akshay Venkatesh, of Stanford University. He will be visiting various Australian universities throughout September and October 2013. (lecture tour)

Biography

Akshay Venkatesh received his PhD in 2002 from Princeton University and his undergraduate degree from The University of Western Australia. His research is in pure mathematics — specifically, in number theory and related areas. His research interests are in the fields of counting, equidistribution problems in automorphic forms and number theory, in particular representation theory, locally symmetric spaces and ergodic theory. In 2008 he won the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize. This annual prize is for outstanding contributions to areas of mathematics influenced by the genius Srinivasa Ramanujan.

• Colloquium: Wednesday 9 Oct, 15:00 EST;
  Room G35 Mathematics Department, Australian National University.
  The Cohen-Lenstra heuristics: from arithmetic to topology and back again

Abstract: I will discuss some models of what a “random abelian group” is, and some conjectures (the Cohen–Lenstra heuristics of the title) about how they show up in number theory. I'll then discuss the function field setting and a proof of these heuristics, with Ellenberg and Westerland. The proof is an example of a link between analytic number theory and certain classes of results in algebraic topology ("homological stability").