18/02/2010, 15:00 — 16:00 — Room P4.35, Mathematics Building
João Boavida, Instituto Superior Técnico
Quadratic forms and the structure of orthogonal groups
This talk will be a leisurely review of some classical material from the first two thirds of the last century, as background for the next talk (on how to actually calculate a period over ). Specifically, today we will discuss the following topics: non-degenerate quadratic forms over a field (for example, over , ), the parabolic subgroups of orthogonal groups (for the same example, ), and the role they play on the structure of . We will also see how to construct Eisenstein series over .
