The three-year funding supports a joint effort by Prof. Friedberg of BC, Prof. D. Bump of Stanford, Prof. D. Goldfeld of Columbia and Prof. J. Hoffstein of Brown to apply a concept called Multiple Dirichlet Series to analytic number theory, a central area of modern mathematics that is concerned with the properties of numbers, and is used in encryption and data-transmission algorithms.
"It is a chance to develop a new line of research of great potential that could tell us new things about some long-standing problems in number theory," Friedberg said.
Dirichlet series are functions of a complex variable whose properties capture the behavior of a family of related number-theoretic quantities, said BC's Friedberg, whose team developed the study of multi-variable generalizations called Multiple Dirichlet Series.
The grants have been awarded under the NSF Mathematical Sciences Division's Focused Research Group Program, which supports investigative teams that share ideas and information from various scientific fields and disciplines.