Seminar series
Date
Mon, 02 Dec 2019
Time
16:00 -
17:00
Location
C1
Speaker
George Robinson
Organisation
Oxford
L-functions have become a vital part of modern number theory over the past century, allowing comparisons between arithmetic objects with seemingly very different properties. In the first part of this talk, I will give an overview of where they arise, their properties, and the mathematics that has developed in order to understand them. In the second part, I will give a sketch of the beautiful result of Herbrand-Ribet concerning the arithmetic interpretations of certain special values of the Riemann zeta function, the prototypical example of an L-function.