Number Theory

The integers and prime numbers have fascinated people since ancient times. Recently, the field has seen huge advances. The resolution of Fermat's Last Theorem by Wiles in 1995 touched off a flurry of related activity that continues unabated to the present, such as the recent solution by Khare and Wintenberger of Serre's conjecture on the relationship between mod p Galois representations and modular forms. The Riemann hypothesis, a Clay Millennium Problem, is a part of analytic number theory, which employs analytic methods (calculus and complex analysis) to understand the integers. Recent advances in this area include the Green-Tao proof that prime numbers occur in arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. The Langlands Program is a broad series of conjectures that connect number theory with representation theory. Number theory has applications in computer science due to connections with cryptography.

The research interests of our group include Galois representations, Shimura varieties, automorphic forms, lattices, algorithmic aspects, rational points on varieties, and the arithmetic of K3 surfaces.

Number Theory at MIT

Department Members in This Field

Faculty

Henry Cohn Discrete Mathematics
Bjorn Poonen Arithmetic Geometry, Algebraic Number Theory, Rational Points on Varieties, Undecidability
Andrew Sutherland Computational Number Theory and Arithmetic Geometry
Zhiwei Yun Representation Theory, Number Theory, Algebraic Geometry
Wei Zhang Number Theory, Automorphic forms, Arithmetic Geometry

Instructors & Postdocs

Aaron Landesman Classical algebraic geometry, moduli spaces, arithmetic statistics, monodromy, mapping class groups
Siyan Daniel Li-Huerta Arithmetic Geometry, Langlands Program
Thomas Rüd Number theory, representation theory of p-adic groups, algebraic geometry
Robin Zhang Number Theory, Automorphic Forms, Diophantine Geometry

Researchers & Visitors

Shiva Chidambaram Algebraic number theory, abelian varieties, Galois representations, arithmetic geometry
Edgar Costa Computational Number Theory, Arithmetic Geometry
David Roe Computational number theory, Arithmetic geometry, local Langlands correspondence
Samuel Schiavone Computational number theory, arithmetic geometry
Raymond van Bommel Computational Number Theory, Arithmetic Geometry

Graduate Students*