Monday 25 February, 8:30PM
Addition, multiplication, and why they don’t get along
Dr Julia Wolf (DPMMS)
The sum-product conjecture, put forward by Erdős and Szemerédi in the 1980s, states that the set of all pairwise sums and the set of all pairwise products of a finite subset of the reals cannot simultaneously be close to minimal in size. Despite the simplicity of its statement and a significant amount of research effort devoted to its resolution, the conjecture remains open to this day. In this talk I will explain the motivation for the conjecture as well as some fascinating partial results.