Seminar series
Date
Thu, 14 Oct 2010
Time
16:00 -
17:00
Location
L3
Speaker
Dr S Siksek
Organisation
Dept. Mathematics, University of Warwick
Let C be a smooth plane cubic curve over the rationals. The Mordell--Weil Theorem can be restated as follows: there is a finite subset B of rational points such that all rational points can be obtained from this subset by successive tangent and secant constructions. It is conjectured that a minimal such B can be arbitrarily large; this is indeed the well-known conjecture that there are elliptic curves with arbitrarily large ranks. This talk is concerned with the corresponding problem for cubic surfaces.