The Fifth Pacific Northwest Number Theory Conference

Saturday February 24, 2001 all day.

Place: University of Washington, Seattle (Padelford, room C36.)

The schedule of talks is the following: First talk 11:30-1:00PM Haruzo Hida from UCLA will talk on: Arithmetic of $p$-adic Hecke $L$-functions Abstract: In this talk I will describe the relation between the power series expansion of the $p$-adic Hecke $L$-function constructed by Katz and the $q$-expansion of an Eisenstein series. In some favourable cases, one can prove the vanishing of the $\mu$-invariant. Second talk 3:00-4:00PM Nike Vatsal from UBC will talk on Elliptic curves over anticyclotomic fields Abstract: We will describe recent results, due to the speaker and C.Cornut, on Mazur's conjectures about the structure of the Mordell-Weil group of an elliptic curve over an anticyclotomic tower of number fields. As an application, we discuss Nekovar's unconditional proof of the parity conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer. We will go to lunch at one of the restaurants near the university between 1-3PM. Please let us know if you are planning to attend. Best wishes, Imin Chen, Adrian Iovita, Nike Vatsal.