number theory

The Fontaine-Winterberger theorem: going full tilt

This is the first in a series of posts whose goal is quite ambitious. Namely, we will attempt to give an intuitive explanation of why the recent push of several prominent mathematicians (Fargues, Scholze, etc.) to ‘geometrize’ the ‘arithmetic’ local Langlands program is intuitively feasible (at least, why it seems intuitive to me!) and, more to the point, to understand some of the major objects/ideas necessary to discuss it.

The goal of this post, in particular, is to try and understand why perfectoid fields (of which perfectoid spaces, their more corporeal counterparts) are natural objects to consider. This is far from a historical account of perfectoid fields and tilting, of which I am far from knowledgable. Instead, this is more in the style of Chow’s excellent You Could Have Invented Spectral Sequences explaining how one might have arrived at the definition of perfectoid fields by ‘elementary considerations’.

This post is somewhat out of order. In some magical world where I actually planned out my posts, this would have been situated less anteriorly but, as we’re constantly reminded, we do not live in a perfect world!

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Shimura Varieties: motivation

EDIT: While these notes might be still useful to read, if one wants a more in-depth explanation of the ideas below see the notes from this post.

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This will be the first in a series of posts discussing Shimura varieties. In particular, we will focus here on a sort of broad motivation for the subject—why Shimura varieties are a natural thing to study and, in particular, what they give us.

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Local class field theory: a discussion

In this post we discuss local class field theory (specifically looking at $p$ -adic fields) with a focus on the broader picture, and the multiple approaches.