This award is for the support of the Southern California Number Theory Day (SCNTD) Conference Series at the University of California-San Diego. The first conference will be held September 20-22, 2013. The other two SCNTD conferences will be one-day meetings that are organized on a Saturday in 2014 and 2015 and will consist of 4 or 5 one-hour, high-quality lectures on the latest research in number theory and related areas (for example, model theory, cryptography, or algebraic geometry), given by research leaders in these fields who also have a reputation for their excellent expository skills. The first eight meetings (2005-2012) have each brought together an average of 40 participants from universities, FFRDC's, and liberal arts colleges in Southern California, ranging from beginning graduate students to senior faculty and researchers. The speakers at the SCNTD conferences are an internationally diverse group of number theorists, speaking on a wide variety of topics. The lectures are designed to promote research and to encourage fruitful interactions among researchers at various stages of their careers. One of the main goals of the conferences is to disseminate the latest research in number theory and related areas. The SCNTD conferences offer their participants the opportunity to interact with scholars from other institutions, and also give graduate students and postdocs the opportunity to interact with more senior mathematicians in an informal setting, conducive to learning and collaboration. Most universities and colleges in Southern California have small number theory groups which makes it difficult to maintain regular and active number theory seminars. The SCNTD conferences have become a very effective way to bring together a critical mass of number theorists in a way that most of these institutions individually could not possibly afford.
The current award will fund the next three Southern California Number Theory Day meetings at UC San Diego in 2013, 2014 and 2015. Due to several recent breakthroughs in the area of research related to Stark's Conjectures (deep conjectural links between analytic mathematical objects called L-functions and discrete mathematical objects called global units), the first of these meetings, to be organized on September 20-22 of 2013, will be a three-day conference entitled "Stark's Conjectures and related topics", consisting of 15 one-hour lectures delivered by the most recent main contributors to this exciting area of research in modern number theory. The conference has been broadly advertised and the organizers will make special efforts to encourage and fund the participation of graduate students and young researchers who have showed interest and potential in this area of research. The conference website can be found at www.math.ucsd.edu/~scntd/.
