The playground of elliptic curves
The million-dollar guess at Cambridge
The infinite hunt and the prize
YOUR GOAL
Master of The million-dollar mystery of elliptic curves
diego Mathematicians built a special mathematical bridge called an L-function to pack up all their data.
diego To find infinite patterns, they first counted points in limited, clock-like arithmetic systems.
Computer crunching: The EDSAC 2 computer used by Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer in 1960 was about 100,000 times slower than a modern smartphone but still cracked the pattern.
An opinion or conclusion formed on the basis of incomplete information. In 1965, Bryan Birch and Peter Swinnerton-Dyer used a Cambridge computer to formulate their famous conjecture.
What was the name of the early computer used by Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer to test their conjecture?
According to the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, what value must the L-function have at s=1 for the curve to have infinite rational points?
In the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, what is the 'order of vanishing' of the L-function at s=1 conjectured to equal?
What kind of clock-like arithmetic did Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer use to simplify their elliptic curve point calculations?
Which university's computer did Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer use to run their calculations?
What mathematical function packages all of an elliptic curve's prime number data into one object?