Conference: Meeting in the Middle: Conference on characteristic 0 and characteristic p multiple zeta values

Louisiana Tech University, Ruston LA

Investigators

Abstract

This award will support US based mathematicians to attend an international conference, titled “Meeting in the Middle: Conference on Characteristic 0 and Characteristic p Multiple Zeta Values”, held March 16-20, 2026, at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. This conference is planned to be a "building bridges"-type conference. It will bring together researchers from two separate, but related areas of mathematics: Multiple Zeta Values (MZV) over function fields (characteristic p) and MZV over the real numbers (characteristic 0). These two groups are concentrated largely in Japan and the US/EU respectively, hence the location of Hawaii is a natural meeting ground in the middle. This conference will provide an opportunity to discuss recent results, techniques and breakthroughs, strengthen research ties between the US and Japan, and positively impact the careers of multiple early career researchers in the US. Multiple zeta values were originally developed by Euler in his quest to better understand and evaluate values of the Riemann zeta function at positive integers.  They are defined as natural generalizations of the Riemann zeta function, extended to multiple sums. The main driving question behind the study of MZV is to understand all rational, linear relations between them. It is conjectured that the vector space of MZV is graded by weight and one of the primary open questions in the area of MZV is Zagier's dimension conjecture, which gives precise formulas for the dimension of these weight spaces. Expanding on this conjecture, Hoffman's basis conjecture states that there exists a basis of MZV for each weight space using indexes consisting only of 2's and 3's. This conference will address progress on each of these topics, as well as related topics associated with MZV. The conference website is: https://sites.google.com/view/hawaii-mzv-2026/home-page 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.