[Crib-list] TODAY -- SPEAKER: Andrew V. Sutherland (MIT) -- Computational Research in Boston and Beyond Seminar (CRIBB) -- Friday, Sept. 2, 2011 --12:30 PM in Room 32-124 (fwd)

[Shirley Entzminger]

T O D A Y . . .

 	     COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH in BOSTON and BEYOND SEMINAR


DATE:		Friday, September 2, 2011

TIME:		12:30 PM

LOCATION:	Building 32, Room 124 (Stata Center)
 		(32 Vassar Street, Cambridge)


[Pizza and beverages will be provided at 12:15 PM outside Room 32-124.]


TITLE: 		"Telescopes for Mathematicians"

SPEAKER:	Andrew V. Sutherland  (MIT)


ABSTRACT:

High performance computing is changing the way mathematicians go about their 
research.  Thanks to cheap parallelism and dramatically faster algorithms, we 
are now able to "see" objects that were once thought to be computationally 
inaccessible, and at a remarkable level of detail.  This additional resolution 
allows us to formulate very precise conjectures, and, in many cases, may 
illuminate the path to a proof.

I will give an overview of some very recent (and still ongoing) research in 
number theory, concerning analogues of the Sato-Tate conjecture in higher 
dimension.  These conjectures predict the asymptotic behavior of certain 
arithmetic statistics attached to algebriac curves (and abelian varieties) 
using a random matrix model.  Such models have been used on a heuristic basis 
for quite some time, but it is only very recently that we have begun, in 
certain cases, to be able to prove that these models are correct.

My talk will focus on the computational challanges we face in this research, 
and describe some of the solutions we have obtained thus far. I will also show 
many of the beautiful pictures (and even videos) that we were able to make with 
the "telescope" that we built.

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Mathematics
Cambridge, MA