I will discuss the notion of badly approximable points and recent progress and problems in this area, including Schmidt's conjecture, badly approximable points on manifolds and real numbers badly approximable by algebraic numbers.

TBA

Iwasawa theory is a powerful technique for relating the behaviour of arithmetic objects to the special values of L-functions. Iwasawa originally developed this theory in order to study the class groups of number fields, but it has since been generalised to many other settings. In this talk, I will discuss some new results in the Iwasawa theory of the symmetric square of a modular form. This is a joint project with Sarah Zerbes, and the main tool in this work is the Euler system of Beilinson-Flach elements, constructed in our earlier works with Kings and Lei.

Given a family $F$ of elliptic curves defined over $Q$, we are interested in the set $H(Y)$ of curves $E$ in $F$, of positive rank, and for which the minimum of the canonical heights of non-torsion rational points on $E$ is bounded by some parameter $Y$. When one can show that this set is finite, it is natural to investigate statistical properties of arithmetic objects attached to elliptic curves in the set $H(Y)$. We will describe some problems related to this, and will state some results in the case of families of quadratic twists of a fixed elliptic curve.

following the joint paper with L.Shaheen http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/zilber/wLb.pdf

The representation dimension of an algebra was introduced in the early 70's by M. Auslander, with the goal of measuring how far an algebra is from having finite number of finitely generated indecomposable modules (up to isomorphism). This invariant is not well understood. For instance, it was not until 2002 that O. Iyama proved that every algebra has finite representation dimension. This was done by constructing special quasihereditary algebras. In this talk I will give an introduction to this topic and I shall briefly explain Iyama's construction.