Joint Lecture Series in Modern Number Theory 求真-晨兴现代数论讲座

Spring 2024: The Mordell Conjecture

Thursdays 2 pm. Location to be announced each time.

Organized by
Yichao Tian (MCM)
Yihang Zhu (YMSC)

Introduction

The Mordell Conjecture was one of the greatest achievements in number theory in 20th century. It states that a projective smooth curve of genus at least 2 defined over a number field has only finitely many rational points. This conjecture was proposed by Mordell in 1922, and first proved by Faltings in 1983. Faltings’ approach uses deep results on abelian varieties, Galois representations and Arakelov geometry, and it reduces the proof to Tate conjecture and Shafarevich conjecture for abelian varieties, which also have great importance in number theory. Later on, Vojta gave a new proof of the Mordell Conjecture in 1989 using Diophantine approximation, and Lawrence and Venkatesh gave in 2019 a third proof using p-adic Hodge theory. Nowadays, topics related to further generalization and improvements of Mordell’s conjecture are still very active in the research of number theory.

During this semester and possibly continuing to the next, our goal is to go over Faltings’ original proof of Mordell’s conjecture, and if time allows, we may also discuss Lawrence--Venkatesh’s more recent approach. The aimed participants are advanced undergraduate students and beginning graduate students. We will ask professors from both Morningside Center and Tsinghua to give talks whenever suitable, while the students are also encouraged to volunteer to give talks.

*To Qiuzhen students: If your want to choose Number Theory as your future research direction, you are expected to participate in one of several number theory activities in order to have a solid background. The above seminar is one of the main activities we organize with the goal of preparing potential PhD students in number theory. The seminar will continue in the future semesters as well, and we hope to make it a platform for potential students and PhD advisors (from YMSC and MCM) to interact. More information on choosing number theory advisors will be announced later.