TITLE:  Obstruction in modular towers.
(Darren Semmen)


SLIDES:  semmen-RedLodgeSlides.pdf


ABSTRACT:  The difficulty in proving the regular version of the Inverse Galois Problem would be explained by the (conjectural) disappearance of rational points on high levels of any modular tower.  It is already known that there are no projective sequences of rational points, so the current strategy to prove this conjecture is to characterize infinite sequences of components and (for r = 4) show that their genera are unbounded.  This talk surveys tools required for the first task (i.e. the analysis of obstruction of connected components):
  1. The modular representations that define the sequence of finite groups used to create a modular tower.
  2. Cohomological dimension and Poincarè duality groups.

REFERENCES:  The two survey talks of Anna Cadoret and Pierre Dèbes.

D. Semmen, The group theory behind modular towers, in Groupes de Galois arithmétiques et différentiels (Luminy 2004; eds. D. Bertrand and P. Dèbes),  Séminaires et Congrès, 13, (to appear).  At http://members.cox.net/dsemmen/

K.S. Brown, Cohomology of groups, Graduate Texts in Mathematics, 87. Springer-Verlag, New York-Berlin, 1982.

M.D. Fried, The Main Conjecture of Modular Towers and its higher rank generalization, in Groupes de Galois arithmétiques et différentiels (Luminy 2004; eds. D. Bertrand and P. Dèbes),  Séminaires et Congrès, 13, (to appear).  At http://www.math.uci.edu/~mfried/talkfiles/lum03-12-04.html