Scientific

The classical theory of hypergeometric functions, developed by generations of mathematicians including Gauss, Kummer, and Riemann, has been used substantially in the ensuing years within number theory, geometry, and the intersection thereof. In more recent decades, these classical ideas have been translated from the complex setting into the finite field and p
-adic settings as well.

In this talk, we will give a friendly introduction to hypergeometric functions, especially in the context of number theory.

Density functional theory (DFT) is one of the workhorses of quantum chemistry and material science. In principle, the joint probability of finding a specific electron configuration in a material is governed by a Schrödinger wave equation. But numerically computing this joint probability is computationally infeasible, due to the complexity scaling exponentially in the number of electrons. DFT aims to circumvent this difficulty by focusing on the marginal probability of one electron. In the last decade, a connection was found between DFT and a multi-marginal optimal transport problem with a repulsive cost. I will give a brief introduction to this topic, including some open problems, and recent progress.

Let $F$ be the field of $p$-adic numbers (or, more generally, a non-
archimedean local field) and let $G$ be $\mathrm{GL}_n(F)$ (or, more generally,
the group of $F$-points of a split connected reductive group). In the
framework of the local Langlands program, one is interested in studying
certain classes of representations of $G$ (and hopefully in trying to match
them with certain classes of representations of local Galois groups).

In this talk, we are going to focus on the category of smooth representations
of $G$ over a field $k$. An important tool to investigate this category is
given by the functor that, to each smooth representation $V$, attaches its
subspace of invariant vectors $V^I$ with respect to a fixed compact open
subgroup $I$ of $G$. The output of this functor is actually not just a $k$-
vector space, but a module over a certain Hecke algebra. The question we are
going to attempt to answer is: how much information does this functor preserve
or, in other words, how far is it from being an equivalence of categories? We
are going to focus, in particular, on the case that the characteristic of $k$
is equal to the residue characteristic of $F$ and $I$ is a specific subgroup
called "pro-$p$ Iwahori subgroup".

Fix $N\geq 1$ and let $L_1, L_2, \ldots, L_N$ be Dirichlet L-functions with distinct, primitive and even Dirichlet characters. We assume that these functions satisfy the same functional equation. Let $F(s)∶= c_1L_1(s)+c_2L_2(s)+\ldots+c_NL_N(s)$ be a linear combination of these functions ($c_j \in\mathbb{R}^*$ are distinct). $F$ is known to have two kinds of zeros: trivial ones, and non-trivial zeros which are confined in a vertical strip. We denote the number of non-trivial zeros $\rho$ with $\frac{F}(\rho)$\leq T$by$N(T)$, and we let$N_\theta(T)$be the number of these zeros that are on the critical line. At the end of the 90's, Selberg proved that this linear combination had a positive proportion of zeros on the critical line, by showing that$\kappa F∶=\lim \inf T (N_\theta(2T)−N_\theta(T))/(N(2T)−N(T))\geq c/N^2$for some$c>0$. Our goal is to provide an explicit value for$c$, and also to improve the lower bound above by showing that$\kappa F \geq 2.16\times 10^{-6}/(N \log N)$, for any large enough$N$.

We will discuss conjectures and results regarding the Hilbert
Property, a generalization of Hilbert's irreducibility theorem to arbitrary
algebraic varieties. In particular, we will explain how to use conic fibrations
to prove the Hilbert Property for the integral points on certain surfaces,
such as affine cubic surfaces.