Chad Awtrey, assistant professor of mathematics, presented a research talk on p-adic numbers at the annual meeting of the North Carolina Academy of Science in Elon, N.C., on March 26, 2011.
Awtrey’s talk, Computing Galois groups of p-adic fields, described his new approach for studying the symmetries arising from solutions to polynomial equations whose coefficients are p-adic numbers. The fundamental importance of the p-adic numbers is supported by the fact that they play a significant role in computational attacks on two of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics; namely, the Riemann Hypothesis and the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture.
The solution for each problem carries a $1 million prize fund, which is provided by the Clay Mathematics Institute of Cambridge, Mass.