Midlands Logic Seminar

Week 9, 11 March 2014 (17:00-19:00 Watson 310)

Speaker: Colin McLarty (Case Western) at 5:00 pm

Elementary Function Arithmetic is a natural context for the classical Galois theory of algebraic number fields, though Reverse Mathematics puts sharp limits on how much it can do for general countable fields. The talk will address progress on the Artin-Schreier theorem, and the relation to proofs of Ribet's theorem.

Colin will also be speaking at the workshop What does it take to prove Fermat's Last Theorem? (March 18-20) sponsored by the Warwick Mathematics Institute.

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Speaker: Piers Bursill-Hall (Cambridge)
Venue: Watson LRA
Time: 6.30 pm
Date: Tuesday 11th March
Title: Pythagoras? I'm sorry, you have been lied to.

Abstract:
The modern story of early Greek mathematics simply does not include Pythagoras or the Pythagoreans. There is effectively no evidence for the existence of Pythagoras, he did not prove the theorem, and the Pythagoreans (or any Greeks) did not discover irrationals, let alone the irrationality of 2. They did not, and could not, have made the discovery. And the cult of Pythagoreans, such as they were there in the 5th and 4th century were not engaged in interesting mathematics. Sorry ...

(This talk is the IMA West Midlands Branch meeting - all visitors very welcome!)