Members' Colloquium

To any unital, associative ring R one may associate a family of invariants known as its algebraic K-groups. Although they are essentially constructed out of simple linear algebra data over the ring, they see an extraordinary range of information: depending on the ring, its K-groups can be related to zeta functions, corbordisms, algebraic cycles and the Hodge conjecture, elliptic operators, Grothendieck's theory of motives, and so on.

Our understanding of algebraic K-groups, at least as far as they appear in algebraic and arithmetic geometry, has rapidly improved in the past few years. This talk will present some of the fundamentals of the subject and explain why K-groups are related to the ongoing special year in p-adic Arithmetic Geometry. The intended audience is non-specialists