NSF grants $1 million to number theory project by Boston College, Stanford, Brown, Columbia

Boston College Mathematics Professor Solomon Friedberg and three colleagues at Stanford, Brown and Columbia universities have been awarded $1.05 million in grants from the National Science Foundation for a collaborative research project in the area of number theory.

The three-year funding supports a joint effort by Prof. Friedberg of BC, Prof. D. Bump of Stanford, Prof. D. Goldfeld of Columbia and Prof. J. Hoffstein of Brown to apply a concept called Multiple Dirichlet Series to analytic number theory, a central area of modern mathematics that is concerned with the properties of numbers, and is used in encryption and data-transmission algorithms.

"It is a chance to develop a new line of research of great potential that could tell us new things about some long-standing problems in number theory," Friedberg said.

Dirichlet series are functions of a complex variable whose properties capture the behavior of a family of related number-theoretic quantities, said BC's Friedberg, whose team developed the study of multi-variable generalizations called Multiple Dirichlet Series.

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The grants have been awarded under the NSF Mathematical Sciences Division's Focused Research Group Program, which supports investigative teams that share ideas and information from various scientific fields and disciplines.

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