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Penn Mathematics Colloquium

Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - 4:30pm

Bjorn Poonen

UC Berkeley (visiting Harvard and MIT in Fall 2007)

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL A6

The work of Martin Davis, Hilary Putnam, and Julia Robinson in 1961 completed by Yuri Matijasevic in 1970 proved that there is no general algorithm to decide whether a multivariable polynomial equation with integer coefficients has a solution in integers. It is still not known whether an algorithm exists for the analogous problem for rational numbers. I will describe progress on this and related problems.