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Monday, October 14th, 4:00-5:00 PM

General Academic Building, Room 104, Refreshments served at 3:30pm

Ken Ribet

University of California, Berkeley

Abstract

Most of us have encountered the Fibonacci sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5,... but know very little about the 13th century mathematician Fibonacci. Some eight hundred years ago, he wrote "The book of squares", a treatise about the numbers 1, 4, 9, 16, 25,.... Fibonacci was fascinated by triads of perfect squares like 1, 25, 49, where the middle
number is the average of the two others. The study of these triads leads to open problems in mathematics that are illuminated by a fundamental conjecture involving cubic curves.

 Bio

Ken Ribet is Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Brown University, and his PhD from Harvard University. Ken works in algebraic number theory and arithmetic geometry. He is known for several marquee results in number theory. In particular, the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem relies crucially on Ribet's proof of the "Epsilon Conjecture" in the late 1980s.
Ken was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997 and the US National Academy of Sciences in 2000. He was awarded the Fermat Prize in 1989 and received an honorary PhD from Brown University in 1998. He received the Brouwer medal from the Royal Dutch Mathematical Society (KWG) in 2017. Ken served as President of the American Mathematical Society between 2017 and 2019 and recently completed a three-year term on the Council of the US National Academy of Sciences.

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