Conference: The Mordell conjecture 100 years later

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

The award will support a conference, ``The Mordell conjecture 100 years later'', at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the week July 8-12, 2024. The conference website, showing the list of invited speakers, is https://mordell.org/ . The Mordell conjecture, proved in 1983, is one of the landmarks of modern number theory. A conference on this topic is needed now, because in recent years, there have been advances on different aspects of the conjecture, while other key questions remain unsolved. This would be the first conference to bring together all the researchers coming from these different perspectives. The conference will feature 16 hour-long lectures, with speakers ranging from the original experts to younger mathematicians at the forefront of current research. Some lectures will feature surveys of the field, which have educational value especially for the next generation of researchers. The conference will also feature a problem session and many 5-minute lightning talk slots, which will give junior participants an opportunity to showcase their own research on a wide variety of relevant topics. The award will support the travel and lodging of a variety of mathematicians including those from underrepresented groups in mathematics and attendees from colleges and universities where other sources of funding are unavailable. Materials from the lectures, problem session, and lightning talks will be made publicly available on the website, to reach an audience broader than just conference attendees. The Mordell conjecture motivated much of the development of arithmetic geometry in the 20th century, both before and after its resolution by Faltings. The conference will feature lectures covering a broad range of topics connected with the Mordell conjecture, its generalizations, and other work it has inspired. In particular, it will build on recent advances in the following directions: 1) nonabelian analogues of Chabauty's p-adic method; 2) the recent proof via p-adic Hodge theory; 3) uniform bounds on the number of rational points; 4) generalizations to higher-dimensional varieties, studied by various methods: analytic, cohomological, and computational. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.