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Jay Pottharst's Home Page

research

I am a Visiting Assistant Professor in math at Boston College.

My interest is in algebraic number theory and tangential issues in geometry, especially p-adic phenomena. A little more particularly, I am studying:

• Iwasawa theory, which concerns how arithmetic data vary in p-adic families. I study the growth of Selmer groups of Galois representations in certain Z_p-extensions, and the uniformity of this growth as one moves through an analytic family.
p-adic Hodge theory and (phi,Gamma)-modules, which are used to get a handle on Galois representations of p-adic fields. I study how these structures might elucidate the weird Iwasawa-theoretic properties of nonordinary p-adic Galois representations.
• automorphic forms, especially modular forms, which provide explicit yet nontrivial examples in which to test ideas and questions coming from the previous two items.

Here are my math writings.

I am co-organizing (with Mark Reeder) the BC number theory / representation theory seminar. Its main page is here.

teaching

In Fall 2009, I am teaching MT 310 (introduction to abstract algebra) at MWF 11 and 12 in Fulton 115. My office hours are MWF 10 in Carney 254.

I have previously taught a variety of courses. Some of my leftover materials can be found here.

personal

I am originally from New Orleans. I moved to Cambridge for college, and currently am living around Central Square with my wife.

I am a fan of good food and good beer; I like to cook, and I recently started brewing.

I am interested in politics and current events, though I do not consider my academic position as an appropriate soapbox from which to promote my views.

contact

Jonathan Pottharst
Department of Mathematics, Carney Hall Room 301, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467
or, 850 Massachusetts Ave. #1, Cambridge, MA 02139
(857) 928-5024
(first eight letters of my last name)@bc.edu
my PGP keys