Number Theory

A Beurling number system consists a non-decreasing unbounded sequence of reals larger than 1, which are called generalized primes, and the sequence of all possible products of these generalized primes, which are called generalized integers. With both sequences one associates counting functions. Of particular interest is the case when both counting functions are close to their classical counter parts: namely when the prime-counting function is close to Li(x), and when the integer-counting function is close to ax for some positive constant a.

A Beurling number systems is well-behaved if it admits a power saving in the error terms for both these counting functions. In this talk, I will discuss some general theory of these well-behaved systems, and present some recent work about examples of such well-behaved number systems. This talk is based on joint work with Gregory Debruyne and Szilárd Révész.

The size function $h^0$ for a number field is analogous to the dimension of the Riemann-Roch spaces of divisors on an algebraic curve. Van der Geer and Schoof conjectured that $h^0$ attains its maximum at the trivial class of Arakelov divisors if that field is Galois over $\mathbb{Q}$ or over an imaginary quadratic field. This conjecture was proved for all number fields with the unit group of rank $0$ and $1$, and also for cyclic cubic fields which have unit group of rank two. In this talk, we will discuss the main idea to prove that the conjecture also holds for totally imaginary cyclic sextic fields, another class of number fields with unit group of rank two. This is joint work with Peng Tian and Amy Feaver.

In the late 90's, Keating and Snaith used random matrix theory to predict the exact leading terms of conjectural asymptotic formulas for all integral moments of the Riemann zeta-function. Prior to their work, no number-theoretic argument or heuristic has led to such exact predictions for all integral moments. In 2015, Conrey and Keating revisited the approach of using divisor sum heuristics to predict asymptotic formulas for moments of zeta. Essentially, their method estimates moments of zeta using lower twisted moments. In this talk, I will discuss a rigorous random matrix theory analogue of the Conrey-Keating heuristic. This is ongoing joint work with Brian Conrey.

Historically, the notion of Pólya fields dates back to some works of George Pólya and Alexander Ostrowski, in 1919, on entire functions with integer values at integers; a number field $K$ with ring of integers $\mathcal{O}_K$ is called a Pólya field whenever the $\mathcal{O}_K$-module $\{f \in K[X] \, : \, f(\mathcal{O}_K) \subseteq \mathcal{O}_K \}$ admits an $\mathcal{O}_K$-basis with exactly one member from each degree. Pólya fields can be thought of as a generalization of number fields with class number one, and their classification of a specific degree has become recently an active research subject in algebraic number theory. In this talk, I will present some criteria for $K$ to be a Pólya field. Then I will give some results concerning Pólya fields of degrees $2$, $3$, and $6$.

For every positive integer n, the quotient ring Z/nZ is the natural ring whose additive group is cyclic. The "multiplicative group modulo n" is the group of invertible elements of this ring, with the multiplication operation. As it turns out, many quantities of interest to number theorists can be interpreted as "statistics" of these multiplicative groups. For example, the cardinality of the multiplicative group modulo n is simply the Euler phi function of n; also, the number of terms in the invariant factor composition of this group is closely related to the number of primes dividing n. Many of these statistics have known distributions when the integer n is chosen at random (the Euler phi function has a singular cumulative distribution, while the Erdös–Kac theorem tells us that the number of prime divisors follows an asymptotically normal distribution). Therefore this family of groups provides a convenient excuse for examining several famous number theory results and open problems. We shall describe how we know, given the factorization of n, the exact structure of the multiplicative group modulo n, and go on to outline the connections to these classical statistical problems in multiplicative number theory.