Ruth Moufang – 2021

The speaker of the 2021 Ruth Moufang Lecture  was Jennifer Balakrishnan with three lectures on “Rational points on curves: from Diophantus to the present day”.  The event was opened by Andrea Blunck with a lecture on the life and work of Ruth Moufang: “Ruth Moufang and her work on projective planes”.

Jennifer Balakrishnan is a number theorist working on explicit methods for curves. Her research is motivated by various aspects of the classical and p-adic Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjectures, as well as the problem of algorithmically finding rational points on curves. She is currently the Clare Boothe Luce Associate Professor of Mathematics at Boston University and a member of the Simons Collaboration on Arithmetic Geometry, Number Theory, and Computation. Her research is also supported by an NSF CAREER grant and a Sloan Research Fellowship. Previously, she was a Titchmarsh Research Fellow at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford, a Junior Research Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard. Balakrishnan received an AB and AM from Harvard University and a PhD in Mathematics from MIT.

Since 2004 Andrea Blunck is a Professor of Mathematics and Gender Studies at the Dept. of Mathematics of the University of Hamburg. She received her PhD in mathematics in 1990 at the University of Hamburg and her Habilitation in 1997 at Technical University of Darmstadt. From 1999 until 2001 she was a visiting researcher at Vienna University of Technology (Institute of Geometry) and from 2001 – 2004 a Visiting Professor at the University of Hamburg. Her research areas are in incidence geometry and in mathematics and gender.

CEST Tuesday, July 13, 2021 Thursday, July 15, 2021 Friday, July 16, 2021
15:00 – 15:45 Andrea Blunck – Ruth Moufang and her work on projective planes    
15:50 – 16:00 Jakob Stix – Introductory remarks    
16:00 –
17:00
Jennifer Balakrishnan – Questions about rational points on curves Jennifer Balakrishnan – Mordell’s conjecture and the last ninety-nine years Jennifer Balakrishnan – Explicit methods for rational points on curves