Date: Friday, January 25, 2008 Time: 4:00 - 5:00pm Room: LIT 121   Refreshments:  After the lecture in LIT 339   OPENING REMARKS by Dr. David Richardson Associate Dean of Research, CLAS

Abstract: The talk will focus on algebraic and representation theoretic properties of profinite groups. We will discuss connections with number theory, combinatorics, and low dimensional topology.

 ^* ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Professor Zelmanov, one of the world's most eminenent mathematicians, specializes in group theory, which is a mathematical study of symmetries. Born and educated in the former Soviet Union, he received his doctorate from the Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk in 1980. His dissertation completely changed the field of Jordan algebras. He then continued to make path breaking contributions to group theory and solved the Restricted Burnside Problem for which he was awarded the Fields Medal, the most prestigious prize in mathematics, in 1994. He moved to the United States in 1990 and has held professorships at Wisconsin, Chicago and Yale, before accepting the Rita Atkinson Endowed Chair in Mathematics at the University of California in San Diego, where he is presently. In 2001, when he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, he was the youngest member in the Academy in the mathematics division.