Speaker: Amod Agashe.
Title: The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture.
Affiliation: University of Texas.
Date: Monday, 3 March 2003.
Place and Time: Room 102 - Love Building, 3:35-4:30 pm.
Refreshments: Room 204 - Love Building, 3:00 pm.

Abstract. Elliptic curves are certain cubics that possess a group law. They are objects of great interest in number theory because of their rich structure. For example, they played a key role in the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture gives a conjectural relation between the arithmetic of an elliptic curve and a certain complex analytic function (called the L-function) associated to the elliptic curve. It is a central conjecture in arithmetic geometry and is one of the seven Clay Millennium Prize Problems. In my talk, I will describe this conjecture and mention some of my work on the conjecture.