Wednesday
15
October 2025
4:00 - 5:30 PM IST
Location
Room 113, School of Arts and Sciences
Central Campus
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The Congruent Number Problem
Arts and Sciences Lecture Series
Anupam Saikia
Professor
Department of Mathematics
IIT Guwahati
Speaker
A natural number is called a congruent number if it is the area of a right triangle with all three sides of rational number length. The Congruent Number Problem is to determine all natural numbers n which are congruent, i.e., n=ab-2 where a2 +b2 = c2 and a, b, c are rational numbers. The talk will first touch upon the rich history of this thousand-year-old problem. Most of the partial progress made towards this open problem has been achieved by reformulating the problem in terms of elliptic curves. The talk will highlight some of the major results obtained by this approach. It will conclude by mentioning a few related results that have been obtained by joint work with Shamik Das.
Speaker
Anupam Saikia
<p>Professor Anupam Saikia is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at IIT Guwahati, India. He is recognised for his contributions to arithmetic number theory, particularly in the areas of Iwasawa theory and p-adic measures, and has also published research in mathematical cryptography. He earned his PhD from the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge.</p>
<p>Professor Saikia held postdoctoral positions at several prestigious institutions, including IHES (France) and McGill University (Canada). After a brief stint at IIT Bombay, he joined IIT Guwahati in 2005 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2015.</p>
