Special public lecture:
Terence Tao is a professor at UCLA, 32 years old, and Australia's only ever winner of the highest award in mathematics: a Fields Medal.
When: 7 February 2008 at 5:30–6:30pm.
Where: General Lecture Theatre, Main Quadrangle, University of Sydney
– a little to the left of the word "Main" in the map.
The prime numbers are a fascinating blend of both structure (for instance, almost all primes are odd) and randomness. It is widely believed that beyond the "obvious" structures in the primes, the primes otherwise behave as if they were distributed randomly; this "pseudorandomness" then underlies our belief in many unsolved conjectures about the primes, from the twin prime conjecture to the Riemann hypothesis. This pseudorandomness has been frustratingly elusive to actually prove rigorously, but recently there has been progress in capturing enough of this pseudorandomness to establish new results about the primes, such as the fact that they contain arbitrarily long progressions. We survey some of these developments in this talk.
RSVP (essential for catering purposes):
email info@science.usyd.edu.au or phone 02 9351 3021.