The New York Number Theory Seminar is a research seminar devoted to the theory of numbers and related parts of mathematics and physics. In 1981, Number Theorists Harvey Cohn, David Chudnovsky, Gregory Chudnovsky and Melvyn B. Nathanson, who were then affiliated with City College (CUNY), Columbia University, and Rutgers–Newark, and currently at Lehman College (CUNY) and the Polytechnic University of New York, began to meet regularly, usually on Thursday afternoons, during the academic year at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The location was convenient to all parts of the city and major transportation hubs. Harvey Cohn has retired, but Nathanson is now based in the City University and acts as the host of the seminar. The New York Number Theory Seminar also organizes an annual Workshop on Combinatorial and Additive Number Theory (CANT) at the CUNY Graduate Center. Proceedings of the seminar have been published regularly by Springer-Verlag.
The Graduate Center is currently located at 365 Fifth Avenue, between 34th and 35th Streets. The Ph.D. program in mathematics is located on the fourth floor. The seminar has met on Thursday afternoons for several years.
Key Speakers
Harald Helfgott: In 2013, he released two papers claiming to be a proof of Goldbach's weak conjecture; the claim is now broadly accepted. The problem had a history of over 250 years without a full proof.
Tom Sanders: Went to Oxford University.
Melvyn B. Nathanson: Frequent collaborator with Paul Erdős, who has published more papers in the field of mathematics than any other person. Erdős has collaborated with over 500 people, and wrote 19 papers in number theory with Nathanson. He also organizes the Workshop on Combinatorial and Additive Number Theory, which has been held annually at the Graduate Center, CUNY since 2003. Nathanson's essays on political and social issues related to science have appeared in The New York Times, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The Mathematical Intelligencer, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, and other publications.