Jarník's Lecture by Dr. Gergely Harcos
The ceremonial lecture, held annually in memory of mathematician Vojtěch Jarník, took place this year on Tuesday, September 30, in the Karlín lecture hall K1. Dr. Gergely Harcos from the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics in Budapest delivered a talk on computing with L-functions.
Gergely Harcos received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University in 2003. Since 2017, he has led the Automorphic Forms Research Group at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics. In 2024, he was elected an ordinary member of Academia Europaea. He has delivered more than 100 invited talks at conferences and other professional events.
Abstract of the Lecture:
How many lattice points are there on a large sphere centered at the origin, and how are they distributed? How many prime numbers are there up to a large bound, and how are they distributed in various residue classes? These questions have been systematically studied for at least 225 years, and they are far from being fully resolved. They led to the development of L-functions, a key unifying concept of number theory. I will review some interesting results (old and new) about L-functions, and how they shaped our understanding of the opening questions. The talk will assume no preliminary knowledge of number theory.
