Making Calculus Easy the Hard Way
Andrew Livingston
Department of Mathematics
Eastern Michigan University
You probably haven't heard of the p-adic
numbers, but they are full-fledged number systems on par with the real
numbers—and given there's a p-adic number system for every
prime p, they outnumber ℝ infinity to one! They're also weird
and wild landscapes for which Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
provides a better guide than common sense does: big becomes small, short
becomes long, and geometry can be described but not easily drawn. In this
talk we'll meet the p-adics and see how p-adic calculus
makes short work of testing for convergence of infinite series in a way
calculus students only dream about. We'll also see how the nice properties
of p-adic numbers led to them conquering number theory in the
20th century (spoiler: they played a part in Wiles' proof of Fermat's
Last Theorem).