CCMS Colloquium: Robert Cass (CMC)

CCMS Colloquium invites you to a talk by Assistant Professor of Mathematics Robert Cass of Claremont McKenna College:

Title: An introduction to the Langlands program

Abstract: Class field theory, which was established in the early 20th century, has its origins in Gauss’s law of quadratic reciprocity. As such, it allows one to determine whether certain integer polynomials have a root mod p. The Langlands program is a vast area of current research in number theory that can be viewed as a generalization of class field theory to all integer polynomials. In this talk, I will give a leisurely introduction to this circle of ideas by way of some concrete examples. I will conclude with my own work, which includes a result on the independence of the cohomology theory chosen in a geometric and categorical analogue of the Langlands program.

Brief Bio: Robert Cass joined the Mathematical Sciences Department at CMC as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics this fall. He received his B.S. from the University of Kentucky and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. After that, he was an NSF postdoctoral fellow at Caltech and the University of Michigan. He is interested in the Langlands program and arithmetic geometry, as well as related problems in algebraic geometry and representation theory. He enjoys mathematical questions that are simple to state but whose solutions involve tools from multiple disciplines, especially those with unexpected connections to geometry.