A five-day International Conference on Number Theory is being held at the University of Florida, USA (March 17-21) to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of mathematician Professor Krishnaswami Alladi of the University of Florida. The opening lecture was given by Fields Medallist Manjul Bhargava of Princeton University. The conference featured talks on several aspects of number theory, but had a special emphasis on Ramanujan’s work and problems relating to gaps between prime numbers, areas which in the last two years have witnessed dramatic progress. “Since Professor Alladi has worked both in analytic number theory and has contributed much to the world of Ramanujan, it is only natural that the conference had emphasis on these two areas of mathematics,” said Ramanujan expert Professor George Andrews of Pennsylvania State University, who is an organiser of the conference along with Professor Frank Garvan of the University of Florida.
After Professor Bhargava’s lecture, Professor Dorian Goldfeld of Columbia University spoke about his recent improvement of a result on an additive arithmetic function that Professor Alladi had established in 1975 as an undergraduate student at Vivekananda College in collaboration with the famous Professor Paul Erdos.
Professor James Maynard of Oxford University, winner of the 2014 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize, gave the Ramanujan Colloquium and two more talks describing the latest advances on gaps between primes.
2005 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize Winner Kannan Soundararajan of Stanford University spoke of recent work with his post-doctoral colleague Dr. Robert Lemke-Oliver — a startling result on a bias in the distribution of consecutive prime numbers.
Several aspects of Ramanujan’s work were emphasised at the meeting. The movie The Man Who Knew Infinity starring Dev Patel as Ramanujan was screened at the conference prior to its opening in April in U.S. theatres. The refereed proceedings of the conference edited by Professors George Andrews and Frank Garvan will be published by Springer.
