Jan Nekovar
In Spring 2018 I spent two months at the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College as a CNRS-Imperial fellow. This gave me a great opportunity not only to work on my ongoing research projects, but also to think afresh about more distant questions looming on the horizon.
I am interested in problems arising from attempts at understanding arithmetic significance of special values of zeta-functions and L-functions, such as the Conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer and its generalisations. These questions are very closely related to arithmetic of automorphic forms and their geometric counterparts, Shimura varieties. There are quite a few mathematicians at Imperial College and among the wider number-theoretical community in London working in these areas, and I was very happy to be able to discuss my ideas (and my misconceptions) with them. I also tried to broaden my horizons by asking naive questions people working in other, mostly geometric areas. I think that the ideas which began developing in my mind during my stay at Imperial College will be an important source of inspiration for my further research.
Host: Professor Kevin Buzzard
