Algebra Seminar by Alex Bartel

On Thursday the 7th of February 2019, Alex Bartel (University of Glasgow) will be visiting the Charlotte Scott Centre for Algebra and he will be giving a seminar. His talk will be in INB 3305 at 4pm, and the details are as follows:

Title: What does a random finitely generated abelian group look like?

Abstract: Often, in different branches of mathematics, if an algebraic object is somehow drawn “at random”, then the probability that it is isomorphic to a given object A is proportional to 1/#Aut(A). In this talk I will report on joint work with Hendrik Lenstra, in which we explain that this heuristic can even be made precise in a canonical way in certain situations in which #Aut(A) is infinite. Although the work is purely algebraic, the need for it arose in a number theoretic situation, namely in our attempt to shed more light on the Cohen-Lenstra heuristics concerning ideal class groups of number fields.