This award supports the research in Algebraic Number Theory of Professor Lawrence Washington. He will work on questions involving special units in number fields, Cohen-Lenstra heuristics for class groups of number and function fields, points on elliptic curves, and p-adic polylogarithms. Except for counting, Number Theory, which is the study of the properties of the whole numbers, is the oldest branch of mathematics. In modern days, problems in Number Theory have furnished the driving force to creation of new mathematics in the fields of Pure Algebra, Analysis, and Geometry; some of the most recent and most astonishing applications of Number Theory have appeared in theoretical Computer Science and the Coding Theory.
