| Title: | Making Calculus Easy the Hard Way |
| Speaker: | Andrew Livingston Department of Mathematics Eastern Michigan University Ypsilanti, MI |
| Abstract: | 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). |
| Location: | Palenske 227 |
| Date: | 4/16/2015 |
| Time: | 3:30 PM |
@abstract{MCS:Colloquium:AndrewLivingston:2015:4:16,
author = "{Andrew Livingston}",
title = "{Making Calculus Easy the Hard Way}",
address = "{Albion College Mathematics and Computer Science Colloquium}",
month = "{16 April}",
year = "{2015}"
}