Speaker
Frank Calegari (University of Chicago)
Date
Mon, Oct 21 2024, 1:00pm
Location
383N
In 1978, Apery shocked the mathematical world with an elementary but ingenious proof that zeta(3) is irrational. Despite a great deal of effort and expectation, these methods have not yielded the irrationality of any further Dirichlet L-value. I will revisit the proof and then explain why some classical ideas going back to Borel and Polya suggest a further ingredient to go beyond Apery's method and (hopefully) prove new irrationality results.
This talk is about joint work with Vesselin Dimitrov and Yunqing Tang.