Joint PU/IAS Number Theory

The Chebotarev density theorem is a powerful tool in number theory, in part because it guarantees the existence of primes whose Frobenius lies in a given conjugacy class in a fixed Galois extension of number fields.  However, for some applications, it is necessary to know not just that such primes exist, but to additionally know something about their size, say in terms of the degree and discriminant of the extension.  In this talk, I'll discuss recent work with Peter Cho and Asif Zaman on a closely related problem, namely determining the least prime with a given cycle type.  We develop a new, comparatively elementary approach for thinking about this problem that nevertheless frequently yields the strongest known results.  We obtain particularly strong results in the case that the Galois group is the symmetric group S_n for some n, where determining the cycle type of a prime is equivalent to Chebotarev.