报告人：Prof. Trevor Wooley

（Fellow of the Royal Society, University of Bristol,United Kingdom）

题  目：Sums of powers and the power of counting: 240 years of Waring's problem

时  间：11.23(星期二), 09：30--11：30

               (09:00-09:30为茶点时间, 地点: 思源楼509房间)

地  点：晨兴数学中心110室

Abstract：

In 1770, Edward Waring conjectured that every natural number is the sum of at most 4 squares of natural numbers, or of 9 cubes of natural numbers, or of 19 fourth powers, and so on ... . We will discuss how Waring's problem has been interpreted and resolved over the past 240 years. Counting the number of solutions of generalised Fermat equations plays a central role, and here methods may be elementary, analytic, or involve arithmetic geometry. The work of L.-K. Hua on this topic has been particularly influential, and we will describe some of his results on this topic, together with the most recent developments.