ARITHMETIC CONGRUENCES AND THE STRUCTURE OF IDEAL CLASS GROUPS

Nic Fellini (Queen's University)

Abstract. During the 1960's, the pioneering work of K. Iwasawa showed that much could be gained by replacing classical L-functions of a complex variable by analogous objects of a p-adic variable.  In this talk, I will discuss more on this theme as it relates to investigating the arithmetic of real quadratic and multiquadratic fields.