21th March: James Taylor 

Title: Formal Groups and Applications 

Abstract: This talk will be an introduction to formal groups, and their applications to number theory. After the basics, we will see very concretely how one can use 1-dimensional formal groups to explicitly construct all abelian extensions of a local field (explicit local class field theory). Then we will explore two possible ways to generalise this setup to higher dimensions, either way resulting in realising ``higher dimensional local class field theory'' (local Langlands). 

(Special thanks to James for offering the neat picture!)