Join us for a public lecture with Mathematical Sciences Research Visitor Robin Zhang from MIT. Light refreshments will be served afterwards.

Abstract

In 1844 and 1880, two former classmates recorded their liebsten Jugendträume ("dearest childhood dreams") and sketched a path into "where the most difficult parts of analysis and number theory join". Gotthold Eisenstein and Leopold Kronecker, who were both students of Dirichlet, had hoped that special complex functions could be used to generate various types of algebraic numbers. In 1900, David Hilbert named this as one of the 23 greatest unsolved problems in mathematics; yet more than a century later, this "dearest childhood dream" has only been partially realized. We will journey from milestone to milestone along their visionary path, look back at how far mathematics has progressed, and take a peek at what lies just ahead.

About the speaker

Robin Zhang is currently an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow and Instructor at MIT. Research interests are in number theory, automorphic forms, and Diophantine geometry.

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