Galois groups, cup products and K-theory

Speaker: Kevin Hutchinson (UCD)

Time: 4:00PM
Date: Wed 4th October 2006

Location: Mathematical Sciences Seminar Room

Abstract
A much-studied paper of Sharifi and McCallum in 2003 relates the structure of the Galois group of the maximal p-ramified (p prime) extension of a number field to a cup product in cohomology and, via this, to K-theory and Iwasawa theory. We will give a survey of these ideas and will provide a particularly simple K-theoretic interpretation of part of the cup product which extends some results of Sharifi and McCallum and gives information about the Galois groups of certain number fields.

(This talk is part of the K-Theory, Quadratic Forms and Number Theory series.)