Conference: Comparative Prime Number Theory Symposium

The workshop Comparative Prime Number Theory Symposium, which is the first scientific event to focus predominantly on this subject, will take place on the UBC--Vancouver campus from June 17--21, 2024. One of the first and central topics in the research of number theory is to study the distribution of prime numbers. In 1853, Chebyshev observed that there seems to be more primes taking the form of a multiple of four plus three than a multiple of four plus one.

This phenomenon is now referred to as Chebyshev's bias and its study led to a new branch of number theory, comparative prime number theory. As a subfield of analytic number theory, research in this area focuses on examining how prime counting functions and other arithmetic functions compare to one another. This field has witnessed significant growth and activity in the last three decades, especially after the publication of the influential article on Chebyshev's bias by Rubinstein and Sarnak in 1994.

The primary goal of this award will be to provide participant support and fund US-based early career researchers to attend this unique event, giving them the opportunity to discuss new ideas, advance research projects, and interact with established researchers.

The symposium will bring together many leading and early-career researchers with expertise and interest in comparative prime number theory to present and discuss various aspects of current research in the field, with special emphasis on results pertaining to the distribution of counting functions in number theory and zeros of L-functions, consequences of quantitative Linear Independence, oscillations of the Mertens sum, and the frequency of sign changes. Through this symposium, we will advertise the recently disseminated survey "An Annotated Bibliography for Comparative Prime Number Theory" by Martin et al which aims to record every publication within the topic of comparative prime number theory, together with a summary of results, and presenting a unified system of notation and terminology for referring to the quantities and hypotheses that are the main objects of study.

Another important outcome of the symposium will be compiling and publicizing a problem list, with the hope of stimulating future research and providing young researchers with potential projects. Information about the conference can be found at the website: https://sites.google.com/view/crgl-functions/comparative-prime-number-theory-symposium

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.