# Category Archives: Wednesday

## AMS Special Session quick guide

I did not blog at all Wednesday (my first official day at the JMM), because I was co-organizing an AMS Special Session with Lola Thompson from 8am to 6:15pm, attended the AWM reception, and then I was beat! Anyway, I thought instead of the usual rundown of the session, I would take this opportunity to give some pointers and tips on organizing an AMS Special Session! It’s never too early to start thinking about the next meeting.

Holley Friedlander, Dickinson College.

## AMS Colloquium Lectures: Benedict Gross and “Complex Multiplication: Past, Present, Future”

Benedict Gross, this year’s AMS Colloquium series lecturer.

Benedict Gross kicked off his series of talks in the AMS Colloquium Lectures on Tuesday by speaking about the past, with a plan to reach the future of Number Theory by Friday.  Gross, former MacArthur Fellow and winner of the Cole Prize in Number Theory is the George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Mathematics, Department of Mathematics, Harvard University. The series, entitled “Complex Multiplication: Past, Present, Future,” considers the interplay between imaginary quadratic fields and the theory of elliptic curves. The area “has a long and twisted history,” according to Gross. The first talk covered the two hundred years from 1751 to 1951, beginning with Euler reviewing Fagnano’s work on the lemniscate, and beginning his investigations of “elliptic integrals”  of the form

$\int\frac{dx}{\sqrt{ax^3+bx^2+cx+d}},$

which lead to elliptic curves. Legendre and Gauss studied positive definite binary forms up to equivalence under the special linear group SL_2(Z).  The number of equivalence classes of forms with a given discriminant is called the class number of the discriminant.  The connection between these class numbers (and their modern variants) and elliptic curves becomes the story of complex multiplication.

## Association for Women in Mathematics Panel Discussion, “Promoting Inclusion in Stem”

Talia Fernós started off this great panel with lively introductions of Autumn Kent, subject of a Q&A by Evelyn Lamb, Piper Harron, provocateur postdoc (I hope she allows me to call her that) and author of a straight fire thesis who also writes for inclusion/exclusion, another AMS blog, Pamela Barnett, an English professor at Lasalle University, and Harrison Bray, a postdoc at University of Michigan.  She started us off with axioms from Federico d’Ardila-Mantilla’s  fantastic Notices article about mathematics and a description of underrepresented groups, along with another that she added that I missed: something like inequality exists and is a result of structural things we’ve done?

I went with first names for this live-blogging because I know three of the people on the stage. Sorry for the forced camaraderie, Pamela and Harrison! I hope to meet you two sometime! Also apologies for all the stuff that you said that I missed. I didn’t record, I’m just typing while y’all talk.

## A conversation with writer and longtime JMM attendee, Brian Hayes

Learn more about Brian and check back throughout the week for more interviews with people here at the Joint Mathematics Meetings.