Chad Awtrey, assistant professor of mathematics, presented a research talk on Galois theory and p-adic numbers at the Southeastern Sectional Meeting of the American Mathematical Society at Wake Forest University on Sept. 24, 2011.
Awtrey’s talk, “Computational Galois Theory of P-adic Fields,” updated researchers on his newly-developed algorithms for computing Galois groups of certain p-adic numbers. The Galois group is a useful object in mathematics, encoding arithmetic and structural information about the field it defines. It is also very difficult to compute in general. Efficient algorithms for computing Galois groups of p-adic numbers have applications not only in mathematics, but also in physics and cryptography.