Workshop on Rational Points on Curves and Higher Dimensional Varieties

Monday 16 – Friday 20 June 2008

Organisers: Jean-Louis Colliot-Thélène, Samir Siksek, Alexei Skorobogatov, Michael Stoll

PROGRAMME

Monday 16 June 2008
08:30-09:20 Registration in B1.37 and Coffee in the Mathematics Institute Common Room
09:20-10:20 Ronald van Luijk (Warwick) Density of rational points on diagonal quartic surfaces
10:20-11:00 Coffee in the Mathematics Institute Common Room
11:00-12:00 Tony Varilly (Berkeley) Weak approxiamtion on del Pezzos of degree 1
12:10-13:10 Roger Heath-Brown (Oxford) Sums and differences of 3 k-th powers
13:10-15:00 Lunch
15:00-16:00 Tea in the Mathematics Institute Common Room
16:00-17:00 Tim Browning (Bristol) Manin's conjecture for a non-singular quartic del Pezzo surface
17:10-17:40 Evis Ieronymou (Imperial) Transcendental elements of the Brauer group of diagonal quartic surfaces
18:00 Buffet Dinner in Mathematics Common Room

Tuesday 17 June 2008
09:20-10:20 Bjorn Poonen (Berkeley) Insufficiency of the Brauer-Manin obstruction applied to etale covers
10:20-11:00 Coffee in the Mathematics Institute Common Room
11:00-12:00 Cyril Demarche (Orsay) Descent obstruction and Brauer-Manin obstruction
12:10-13:10 Olivier Wittenberg (Strasbourg) Fundamental groups and the elementary obstruction
13:10-15:00 Lunch
15:00-16:00 Tea in the Mathematics Institute Common Room
16:00-17:00 David Harari (Orsay) The defect of strong approximation on commutative algebraic groups

Wednesday 18 June 2008
09:20-10:20 Minhyong Kim (UCL) A non-abelian principle of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer
10:20-11:00 Coffee in the Mathematics Institute Common Room
11:00-12:00 Ambrus Pal (Imperial) Constructing rational points on genus one curves over function fields
12:10-13:10 Christian Wuthrich (Nottingham) Computations about the Tate-Shafarevich group using Iwasawa theory
Afternoon Off

Thursday 19 June 2008
09:20-10:20 Damiano Testa (Bremen) The Rational Box Problem
10:20-11:00 Coffee in the Mathematics Institute Common Room
11:00-12:00 Victor Flynn (Oxford) Sha and degree 4 del Pezzo surfaces
12:10-13:10 Alexei Skorobogatov (Imperial) On the equations of universal torsors over del Pezzo surfaces
13:10-15:00 Lunch
15:00-16:00 Tea in the Mathematics Institute Common Room
16:00-17:00 Noam Elkies (Harvard) How many points can a genus-2 curve have?
17:10-17:40 Jan Steffen Mueller (Bremen) Explicit Kummer surface theory in arbitrary characteristic
17:40 Drinks and snacks in the Common Room

Friday 20 June 2008
09:20-10:20 Tim Dokchitser (Cambridge) The parity of ranks of elliptic curves
10:20-11:00 Coffee in the Mathematics Institute Common Room
11:00-12:00 Tom Fisher (Cambridge) Minimal models for genus one curves
12:10-13:10 Emmanuel Peyre (Grenoble) Very free rational points
13:10-15:00 Lunch
15:00-16:00 Tea in the Mathematics Institute Common Room
16:00-17:00 Mathematics Colloquium Nils Bruin (Simon Fraser) Deciding existence of rational points on curves
17:00 Drinks and snacks in the Common Room

How to get here

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Contact:
Mathematics Research Centre
Zeeman Building
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL - UK
E-mail:
MRC@warwick.ac.uk