ORGANIZERS:
Brian Conrey, American Institute of Mathematics
Jon Keating, University of Oxford
Hugh Montgomery, University of Michigan
Kannan Soundararajan, Stanford University

 

Summary:
On April 6, 1972 a young graduate student named Hugh Montgomery and the world-renowned mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson had a conversation in the tea room at the Institute for Advanced Study which led to a fusion of two disparate fields and an intellectual revolution that is stronger than ever today.  Montgomery and Dyson discovered that the zeros of the Riemann zeta-function, important for understanding prime numbers, seem to obey the same distribution patterns as the eigenvalues of large random unitary (or hermitian) matrices, which had been extensively studied by physicists, especially to model the interactions within large atomic nuclei. This stunning connection has held up to extensive numerical and theoretical tests over the intervening years and has been extended to give random matrix models for the low lying zeros of families of L-functions and for the moments and distribution of values of the L-functions in these families and to analogous families over function fields. This conference will bring together 130 mathematical scientists to a meeting that will highlight the progress and the state of the art of results at the nexus of these two fields and will underline the questions most pertinent for further research.

SPEAKERS:

Louis-Pierre Arguin, City University of New York	Nina Holden, ETH Zurich
Emma Bailey, City University of New York	Matilde Lalin, Universite de Montreal
Sieg Baluyot, American Institute of Mathematics	Paul Nelson, Institute for Advanced Study
Vorrapan Chandee, Kansas State University	Kyle Pratt, University of Oxford
Alexandra Florea, University of California at Irvine	Zeev Rudnick, Tel Aviv University
Yan Fyodorov, King’s College London	Tom Spencer, Institute for Advanced Study
Adam Harper, University of Warwick	Matt Young, Texas A & M University
Kannan Soundararajan, Stanford University