Conference: Arithmetic, Geometric, and Computational Aspects of Drinfeld Modules and Anderson Motives

A special session "Arithmetic, Geometric, and Computational Aspects of Drinfeld Modules and Anderson Motives", organized by the PI, Tuan Ngo Dac, Matthew Papanikolas, and Federico Pellarin, will take place July 23-26, 2024 in Palermo (Italy), at the joint meeting of the American Mathematical Society and Unione Matematica Italiana. The purpose of this session is to bring together international experts in a variety of areas of arithmetic geometry, automorphic forms, and function field arithmetic. The emphasis of the conference will be on recent spectacular developments in the theory of Drinfeld modules and their generalizations. The conference will increase international collaboration between mathematicians from different parts of the world. This award will cover the travel expenses of invited participants from the United States, with the priority given to junior researchers and members of underrepresented groups. Since their emergence in 1970s, Drinfeld modules and their moduli spaces had a tremendous impact on arithmetic geometry, leading to a successful resolution of the global and local Langlands conjectures over function fields. Over the last few years, there has been an explosion of activity in function field arithmetic, with many spectacular results on special values of higher derivatives of L-functions of automorphic forms, special values of Carlitz-Goss L-functions, and Drinfeld modular forms. In all these works, Drinfeld modules and their generalizations play a prominent role. Moreover, new tantalizing connections have been discovered between different topics of function field arithmetic, such as special values of characteristic p zeta functions, deformations of Drinfeld modular forms, and function field analogue of Fontaine’s theory. These developments, along with possible future directions of research, will be addressed by the invited speakers of the special session with the hope to inspire new generations to take part in this important and very active area of Number Theory. Conference webpage: https://sites.google.com/uniroma1.it/drinfeld-modules/home-page This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.