9622770 Milne Professor Milne works in arithmetic geometry specifically on problems in Diophantine geometry. He will study the conjecture of Langlands and Rapaport on points on Shimura varieties over finite fields. He also hopes to study the degeneration of abelian motives with the hope of exploiting the relation to Shimura varieties in order to obtain information about the compactifications of Shimura varieties over number fields. This project falls into the general area of arithmetic geometry -a subject that blends two of the oldest areas of mathematics: number theory and geometry. This combination has proved extraordinarily fruitful - having recently solved problems that withstood generations. Among its many consequences are new error correcting codes. Such codes are essential for both modern computers (hard disks) and compact disks. ??
