James Freitag : Model theory and Painleve equations

Posted by Mimi Dai , part of the Departmental Colloquium.

At

March 31, 2017, 3 p.m.

In

SEO 636

Abstract

Painleve equations are certain order two nonlinear differential equations which were isolated around the beginning of the last century by Painleve, Gambier, and Fuchs for reasons related to classical analytic problems. The equations arise in a variety of applications from physics to Diophantine geometry. In this talk, we will discuss how model theory can be used to resolve some open problems around the transcendence of Painleve equations.