PIMS UNBC Distinguished Colloquium: John Friedlander

We survey questions, conjectures and results, old and new, about the distribution of prime numbers. We concentrate on the existence and distribution of primes in the integer value sets of polynomials having integer coefficients. The talk is directed to non-specialists in prime number theory and is intended to be widely accessible to undergraduates specializing in mathematics.

Speaker Biography:

John Friedlander is a University Professor at the University of Toronto. He received his PhD from Pennsylvania State University in 1972 under the supervision of S. Chowla. After graduation, he worked as assistant to A. Selberg at the Institute for Advanced Study. Before joining UofT in 1977, he was a lecturer at MIT. Dr. Friedlander is one of the world's most prominent analytic number theorists and is a recognized leader in prime number theory and L-functions. In addition to being a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Founding Fellow of the Fields Institute, Dr. Friedlander is also a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He gave an invited lecture at the 1994 ICM in Zurich. Among the many prestigious awards he has received are the Jeffery Williams prize (1999), CRM-PIMS-Fields Prize (2002) and the AMS Doob prize (2017). He has substantial contributions to Canadian Mathematics through his roles at NSERC, the Royal Society of Canada and the Fields institute.