Content

Speaker

Daniel Gonzalez Cedre

Title

“Férmat’s Little Idea”

Abstract

On a brisk October evening in 1640, a French lawyer wrote to his confidant: whenever an integer "a" is not divisible by a prime number "p", it must be that "a^(p - 1) - 1" is divisible by “p”. This statement about divisibility of numbers is just one manifestation of a fundamental truth about algebraic structures. In this talk, we'll walk through a simple proof of Férmat's Little Theorem that exposes one of the basic connections between  
number theory and algebra. A basic working proficiency with modular arithmetic is helpful but not strictly required.

Bio

Daniel Gonzalez Cedre is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. His current research interests involve explainable machine learning on graphs—at the  
intersection of graph learning and formal languages—with some collaborations in computer vision. He received an MS in Computer Science from the University of Notre Dame in 2023 and an MS Financial Mathematics from  
Florida State University in 2019.

Host

David Mix Barrington

In person event posted in Theory Seminar