Mahler Lecture Tour 2019

Event: Joint Seminar/Public Lecture
Date & Time: Friday 22 November: 15:00–16:00
Venue: Room 4082, Red Centre Bldg., Kensington campus, UNSW Sydney
Speaker: Dr Holly Krieger (University of Cambridge, UK)

Hosted by the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of NSW.

The Mahler lectures are a biennial activity organised by the Australian Mathematical Society, and supported by the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute, in which a prominent mathematician tours Australian universities giving lectures at a variety of levels, including giving several public lectures.

The talk will be followed by refreshments and the opportunity for further discussion.

Title: Transcendence and Dynamics

Abstract

Many interesting objects in the study of the dynamics of complex algebraic varieties are known or conjectured to be transcendental, such as the uniformizing map describing the (complement of a) Julia set, or the Feigenbaum constant. We will discuss various connections between transcendence theory and complex dynamics, focusing on recent developments using transcendence theory to describe the intersection of orbits in algebraic varieties, and the realization of transcendental numbers as measures of dynamical complexity for certain families of maps.

Biography

Born and raised near Chicago, Dr Holly Krieger completed the undergraduate mathematics honors program at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She went on to a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her initial research interests during graduate school were primarily in arithmetic and Diophantine geometry. Under the guidance of Laura DeMarco and Ramin Takloo-Bighash, her thesis work focused on the emerging field of arithmetic dynamics, which studies the relationship between dynamics of one complex variable and the arithmetic geometry of abelian varieties.

She followed her PhD work with an NSF postdoctoral fellowship at MIT under the supervision of Bjorn Poonen, during which time she became particularly interested in problems of unlikely intersections in complex dynamics. Since 2016, she has been the Corfield Lecturer at the University of Cambridge as well as a Fellow at Murray Edwards College.

supported by AMSI.