Title: Rational points, rational curves and higher dimensions
Speaker: Professor Barry Mazur
Speaker Info: Harvard
Brief Description:
Special Note:
Abstract:
The search has been on for a long time, for a sufficiently broad, yet sufficiently amenable, generalization to higher dimensions of the ``class" of algebraic curves of genus 0. Following upon the Mori program of classification of higher dimensional algebraic varieties, Janos Kollar (in his joint work with Miyaoka and Mori) has focussed on rationally connected varieties as a possible candidate. The success of the theory of Kollar and his coworkers regarding this class of varieties, and recent important results due to Graber, Harris and Starr makes it particularly timely to spend an hour reviewing the connection between some of this new work, and classical issues. This is what I propose to do, and to formulate some related arithmetic questions.Date: Friday, February 18, 2002