|Location:||UC Berkeley, 60 Evans Hall|
Speaker: Barry Mazur
Title: Elliptic curves, their companions, and their statistics
What is the probability that a cubic plane curve with rational
coefficients has innitely many rational points?
Questions of this type (more exactly formulated, of course) are among
the many statistical themes being pursued in the program Arithmetic
Statistics at MSRI this semester. In this colloquium I\\'ll give some
background to help appreciate current work on such problems.