Abstract:
Congruences between modular forms have provided many interesting arithmetic properties e.g. the Ramanujan congruence. These congruences led Serre to define the notion of a p-adic family of non-cuspidal modular forms. Hida provided the first example of families of slope zero (ordinary) cuspidal modular forms which have had many important applications e.g FLT and Iwasawa main conjecture. For non-zero slope Gouveá and Mazur made some very precise conjectures which serve as a necessary condition for the existence of p-adic families of modular forms. In this talk, we will give a brief introduction to these concepts and report on current work in progress with Cláudio Velasque related to the Gouveá-Mazur conjecture and some applications.
About the Speaker:
Professor Aftab Pande obtained his PhD from Brandeis University under the direction of Fred Diamond. After his PhD he was a Post-doctoral researcher at the University of Regenberg, Universite de Paris 13 and Cornell University before joining the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brasil. He had been a visiting scholar in Universite Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6). Currently, he is an Associate Professor in UFRJ. His research is in Number theory and Arithmetic Geometry.