The next MaPSS seminar will be held at 17:00 on Mon 23rd in Carslaw 535. It’s a great opportunity to see an interesting talk, meet some fellow postgrads, and get some free pizza and soft drink. ************************************************************************************** Speaker: Ali Mohammadi (The University of Sydney) Title: On collinear triples formed by grids over finite fields Abstract: We consider the problem of finding nontrivial upper bounds on the number of collinear triples formed by cartesian products of sets contained in finite fields of prime power cardinality. Aksoy Yazici, Murphy, Rudnev and Shkredov (2016) have obtained a strong estimate in prime fields, however their method does not extend to arbitrary finite fields. We conclude the talk with some number theoretic applications of our results. ************************************************************************************** See you there! Details can also be found on the school’s new Postgraduate Society website: http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/MaPS/mapss.html Cheers, Eric