Join us at 3 PM on November 2 in 103A Walker for a talk by Dr. Abbey Bourdon, of Wake Forest University.
Abstract: Let E be an elliptic curve defined over a number field F. By a classical theorem of Mordell and Weil, the collection of points of E with coordinates in F form a finitely generated abelian group. We seek to understand the subgroup of points with finite order. In particular, given a positive integer d, we would like to know precisely which abelian groups arise as the torsion subgroup of an elliptic curve defined over a number field of degree d. After providing a brief introduction to elliptic curves and summarizing prior results, I will discuss recent progress on this problem for the special class of elliptic curves with complex multiplication (CM).