Hi all,

This is a reminder that GradSWANTAG VIII will be held this Sunday, March 11th. 

All talks will be held in APM 6402. See below for the schedule and abstracts.

9:30-10 Light breakfast
10-11 Justin
11-12 Jake
12-1 Taylor

Justin Lacini
Title: On log Del Pezzo surfaces of rank one

Abstract: Over the complex numbers, Keel and McKernan have classified all simply connected rank one log Del Pezzo surfaces, with the exception of a bounded family. We complete their classification and extend it to algebraically closed fields of positive characteristic.

Jake Postema
Title: Representations of p-adic Algebraic Groups

Abstract:  The goal of the local Langlands program is (roughly) to construct a correspondence between representations of the absolute Galois group and representations of reductive algebraic groups over local fields. The known proofs of instances of the correspondence depend (among other things) on a detailed classification of the representations (over C or over an l-adic field) of GLn(F), where F is a p-adic field. When l is not equal to p, the process of matching up representations on both sides works, but the case l = p is more difficult. One approach that has worked for GL2(Qp) has been  a mod p Langlands correspondence, which has lead to an interest in finding analogues for $\bar{Fp}$ representations for other algebraic groups. An issue that has arisen is that poor behavior in characteristic p leads to trouble for the classification of mod p representations: the supercuspidal representations are not well understood. We will discuss the classification in both cases, and explain some recent attempts to remedy the deficiencies in duality in the mod p setting.

Taylor McAdam
Title: Effective equidistribution in homogeneous dynamics

Abstract: Equidistribution results play an important role in dynamical systems and their applications in number theory.  Often in such applications it is necessary for equidistribution to be effective (i.e. the rate of convergence is known) so that number-theoretic methods such as sieving can be applied.  In this talk, we will describe some effective equidistribution results in homogeneous dynamics and, if time permits, describe an application to number theory.

Hope to see you there,
Peter and Francois