Distinguished Lecture Series (DLS) 2000 - 2001 People | Seminars & Colloquia | News | Media Page | UCLA Department of Mathematics

These month long lectures by Professor Serre are supported by a generous grant from the Gill Foundation.

Invariants in Galois Cohomology: Definition and Computation Jean-Pierre Serre (Collège de France)

The invariants discussed in these lectures are analogous to the characteristic classes of Topology: G-bundles over a base X -> Cohomology classes of X. The main difference is that X is replaced by Spec(k), where k is a field, and the cohomology of X is replaced by the Galois cohomology of k (or, sometimes, the Witt group of k). With suitable choices of G, the G-bundles over Spec(k) may be interpreted as : quadratic forms of rank n (G = orthogonal group O(n)) octonion algebras (G = exceptional group G2) etale k-algebras of rank n (G = symmetric group Sn). The emphasis will be on the complete determination of all such invariants, especially in case 3).

Distinguished Lecture Series