Speaker:Dr Tom Fisher (DPMMS)
Venue: Old Combination Room, Trinity College
Time: 18/02/2008 20:30, drinks from 20:15

An important source of problems in number theory is the study of Diophantine equations, i.e. systems of (usually polynomial) equations that must be solved in integers or rational numbers. One hope is that these “global” problems can be attacked by putting together “local” information, that is by looking at the problem one prime at a time (and over the reals). This works particularly well for quadratic forms, but generalisations are surprisingly hard to come by.