Matthew Emerton public lecture

SMRI was delighted to welcome Professor Matthew Emerton to the University of Sydney to present a public lecture, as part of the Mahler Lecture Series.
Matthew explained to the audience some of the key ideas in the theory of numbers, as developed over the last two thousand-plus years. Beginning with the theory of geometric constructions from ancient Greek geometry, and its relationship to the discovery and properties of irrational numbers, Matthew sketched in broad outlines how these ideas evolved, through the theory of equations and their symmetries as developed by Galois, culminating in a description of some of the contemporary aspects of the theory. The focus cleverly emphasized how symmetries of mathematical problems, some obvious but some not-so-obvious, play a hidden role in the nature of their solutions.
Matthew Emerton is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Chicago. His areas of research are number theory, arithmetic geometry, and representation theory. He is known for his work on the Fontaine-Mazur conjecture, and for his construction (with Professor Toby Gee of Imperial College) of the eponymous Emerton-Gee Stacks, higher dimensional algebro-geometric objects which parameterize local Galois representations.