Swinnerton-Dyer Memorial: 17th - 20th May 2021

There will be a three day meeting in honour of Professor Sir Peter-Swinnerton-Dyer who died in December 2018 at the age of 91. Swinnerton-Dyer was one of the most influential number theorists of his generation worldwide. He is probably best known for the famous conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer (one of the Millenium Clay Maths Problems), which relates the arithmetic of elliptic curves to the value of its Hasse-Weil L-function. This conjecture gave rise to a huge field of research relating special values of  L-functions  to  arithmetic  data.  Swinnerton-Dyer  was  also  one  of  founding  figures  in  the arithmetic  of  surfaces  and  higher-dimensional varieties,  such  as  local-to-global principles  for rational points over number fields. He obtained fundamental results for conic bundles and cubic surfaces, and started the research of rational points on surfaces fibred into elliptic curves using completely new methods. The meeting aims to celebrate the tremendous and wide-reaching contributions to mathematics of the late Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer. In the early years of the Newton Institute, Swinnerton-Dyer served as honorary executive director under Michael Atiyah. The workshop is part of the London-Paris Number Theory Seminar series and is supported by the London Mathematical Society. The booking deadline is 22nd Feb 2021.