Public lecture
Presented by Professor Terence Tao
When: Tuesday 29 September 2009, 7.00pm
Where: Allan Scott Auditorium, Hawke Building, City West Campus,
University of South Australia.
Structure and randomness in the prime numbers
"God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers" - Paul Erdos
The prime numbers are a fascinating blend of both structure (for instance, almost all primes are odd) and randomness. It is widely believed that beyond the "obvious" structures in the primes, the primes otherwise behave as if they were distributed randomly; this "pseudorandomness" then underlies our belief in many unsolved conjectures about the primes, from the twin prime conjecture to the Riemann hypothesis. This pseudorandomness has been frustratingly elusive to actually prove rigorously, but recently there has been progress in capturing enough of this pseudorandomness to establish new results about the primes, such as the fact that they contain arbitrarily long progressions. We survey some of these developments in this talk.
Satellite Event on October 2: Public Lecture by Terence Tao at the Royal Institution of Australia
Speaker: Terence Tao, Clay-Mahler Lecturer
Title: Cosmic Distance Ladder
When: Friday 2nd October 6.30pm for 7pm start
Where: Adelaide Town Hall, King William Street, Adelaide
How: FREE event but booking required.
Register at EventBrite on www.thecosmicdistanceladder.eventbrite.com.
Abstract:
How do we know the distances from the earth to the sun and moon, from the
sun to the other planets, and from the sun to other stars and distant
galaxies? Clearly we cannot measure these directly. Nevertheless there are
many indirect methods of measurement, combined with basic high-school
mathematics, which can allow one to get quite convincing and accurate
results without the need for advanced technology (for instance, even the
ancient Greeks could compute the distances from the earth to the sun and
moon to moderate accuracy). These methods rely on climbing a “cosmic
distance ladder”, using measurements of nearby distances to then deduce
estimates on distances slightly further away; we shall discuss several of
the rungs in this ladder in this talk.
Hosted by RIAus.
These events are presented in association with the Australian Mathematical Society, the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute and the Clay Mathematics Institute, and form part of the 2009 Clay-Mahler Lecture Tour.