Friday, February 7, 2025 - 11:00 to 12:00
Cathedral of Learning, room 332
Abstract or Additional Information
In his famous Eisenstein-ideal paper, Barry Mazur studied congruences modulo p between Eisenstein series and cuspforms of prime level N. Among other things, he proved that such congruences exist only if N is congruent to 1 modulo p. The trickiest part of this result is to prove that such congruences do not exist if N is -1 modulo p. I'll talk about recent work with Jackie Lang in which we prove that, for such primes N, Eisenstein congruences do exist at level N2, that these congruences can be used to construct non-trivial elements of certain class groups, and that the structure of the congruences is much more rigid than in prime-level case.