Mahler Lecture Tour 2019

Event: Seminar
Date & Time: Monday 9 December: TBA
Venue: University of Queensland
Speaker: Dr Holly Krieger (University of Cambridge, UK)

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.

Title: ABC for the Working Mathematician

Abstract

The abc conjecture, formulated in the 1980s by Masser and Oesterlé, is one of the most important conjectures in number theory, and most discussed conjectures in mathematics in the last decade. Often omitted from this discussion is the justification that the abc conjecture among one of the most interesting problems in mathematics. We will discuss some of the non-number-theoretic connections to and implications of the abc conjecture and related Diophantine questions, and explain why mathematicians in any field should care about this simple and deep number-theoretic assertion.

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.