Tuesday, May 29, 14:00, 7.527.

Frauke Bleher (University of Iowa)
Iwasawa theory and Chern classes.

Abstract:
The leading term in the Taylor expansion of a real valued function at a point is a key concept in real analysis. In this talk, I will discuss what can be considered to be the leading term of a finitely generated torsion module over a Noetherian unique factorization domain. This is the Chern class of the module indexed by the codimension of its support. Classical Iwasawa theory involves the case when the leading terms are "first order". I will discuss new work about when they are "second order". This is joint work with Ted Chinburg, Ralph Greenberg, Mahesh Kakde, Romyar Sharifi and Martin Taylor.