Jan 24
Math/Stats Colloquium: Alexandra Florea
Speaker: Alexandra Florea, an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of California Irvine. Alexandra's research is focused on using analysis to study number theoretic functions that arise in the algebraic setting of function fields. She is particularly interested in understanding how these functions behave on average.
Title: Moments of L-functions
Abstract: Prime numbers are fundamental objects in number theory, and many deep conjectures in the field concern properties of primes. I will explain how the primes are related, via analysis, to the study of zeros of a certain class of functions, called L-functions. I will discuss how understanding the analytic properties of the L-functions provides insight into the distribution of primes, and I will focus on studying moments (i.e., averages of powers of L-functions in certain families) and what these tell us about primes.