Sarah Zerbes: inaugural lecture
On 21 February, Professor Sarah Zerbes gave her inaugural lecture entitled: "Elliptic curves and Fermat’s last theorem". She has been a professor at the Department since 1 January 2022.
Dear Sarah, dear Ulrich, dear family and friends, ladies and gentlemen,
It is my pleasure to welcome you to Sarah Zerbes' inaugural lecture and to introduce her to you.
Sarah Zerbes grew up in Wuppertal, Germany. She attended a Gymnasium with focus on Latin and Ancient Greek (often called 'humanistic' in German-speaking countries). Sarah studied mathematics at Cambridge and completed her studies with a doctoral thesis on Iwasawa theory, supervised by John Coates.
She spent her postdoctoral years in Paris at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) and in London at the Imperial College. Although London is not first known as a climbers' paradise, it was during one of her climbing endavors that Sarah and David Loeffler met. This was the beginning of a fruitful scientific collaboration. And I am convinced that they will be able to pursue their passion for mountains here in Switzerland, too.
Sarah was a lecturer at the University of Exeter from 2008 to 2012 and held several leading positions at University College London from 2012 to 2021. On 1 January 2022, Sarah took her position as Full Professor of Mathematics at ETH Zurich.
Sarah was awarded the Leverhulme Prize in 2014 and (jointly with David Loeffler) the Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society in 2015. She received an ERC Consoldiator Grant for "Euler systems and the Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture" in 2015. In 2022, she and David had been invited to give a section lecture on her exciting results at the International Congress of Mathematicians.
Sarah works in the beautiful, admirable and challenging area of number theory. Her focus is on establishing a better understanding of the Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, which is one of the seven Millenium Problems. Let me quote here: "Supported by much experimental evidence, this conjecture relates the number of points on an elliptic curve mod p to the rank of the group of rational points. Elliptic curves, defined by cubic equations in two variables, are fundamental mathematical objects that arise in many areas: Wiles' proof of the Fermat Conjecture, factorization of numbers into primes, and cryptography, to name three of the applications."
Sarah is not only a great mountaneer including ice climbing, she is also fluent in Latin and loves the work of Thomas Mann. In this respect, too, D-MATH situated in the ETH main building, where the Thomas Mann Archive has a permanent exhibition, is the right place for her to be.
We are very happy to welcome Sarah at D-MATH and we are looking forward to her inaugural lecture.