Date & Time: Wednesday, April 15, 2015, 16:00-17:00.
Venue: Ramanujan Hall
Speaker: C. S. Rajan, TIFR Mumbai
Title: Groups via Conjugacy Classes
Abstract: The study of conjugacy classes naturally arises for groups occurring in arithmetic. For example the Galois group of a finite Galois extension over the rationals comes equipped with a collection of conjugacy classes, the Frobenius conjugacy classes. After talking about some questions in this regard, I will focus on one particular question: the distribution of the fields which arise as splitting fields of the characteristic polynomials of these conjugacy classes with respect to some representation of the group. If time permits, I will talk about a unitary trick in the context of $l$-adic representations of Galois groups.