[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/Iwasawa-photo-edited.jpg” caption=”Romyar Sharifi and Manfred Kolster, the two local organizers of the Summer School in Iwasawa Theory, discuss number theory. Photo by Bradd Hart”]From August 9 to 13, more than 60 mathematics graduates from around the world will gather in Hamilton Hall to take part in the Summer School in Iwasawa Theory. Iwasawa Theory is a central and rapidly expanding area of research within modern algebraic number theory.

They will have come from across Canada, the U.S., Europe, and as far away as India and Japan, for the opportunity to listen to a series of specialized lectures by four world-renowned number theorists: John Coates of Cambridge University, Ralph Greenberg of the University of Washington, Robert Pollack of Boston University, and Eric Urban of Columbia University.

Number theory is an ancient branch of mathematics-it goes back to the days of the Greek mathematician Euclid-that attempts to solve such questions as Are there infinitely many different prime numbers?

Nevertheless, modern number theory lives in a world that ancient mathematicians would not have recognized. One might see it as resting on a series of tremendously abstract constructions that, quite amazingly, can often be used in answering very concrete questions about numbers such as finding integral solutions to polynomial equations.

Iwasawa Theory was the work of the late mathematician Kenkichi Iwasawa of Princeton University in the 1950s and 1960s.

The summer school will provide the students with a foundation in the theory through lectures and late-night student projects-learning that cannot be reproduced merely by reading books and articles.

The school is being supported through funding from the Fields Institute, a Canadian institute devoted to furthering mathematics innovation and education, and the U.S. National Science Foundation. The organizing committee consists of three professors who are themselves distinguished experts in Iwasawa theory: Manfred Kolster and Romyar Sharifi of McMaster and William McCallum of the University of Arizona.

For more information please visit the Summer School in Iwasawa Theory
webpage.