We will discuss the question of defining a p-adic L-function and formulating a main conjecture for an Artin representation. The case where the Artin representation is totally even (or odd) is classical. The corresponding main conjecture has been proven by Wiles.  This talk will discuss the special case where the representation is 2-dimensional, but not totally even or odd. As we will explain, under certain assumptions, there are two p-adic L-functions, two Selmer groups, and two main conjectures. This talk is about joint work with Nike Vatsal. 

A theorem of Eichler and Shimura says that the space of cusp forms with complex coefficients appears as a direct summand of the cohomology of the compactified modular curve. Ohta has proven an analog of this theorem for the space of ordinary p-adic cusp forms with integral coefficients. Ohta's result has important applications in the Iwasawa theory of cyclotomic fields.

We discuss a new proof of Ohta's result using the geometry of Hecke correspondences at places of bad reduction.

The general Ramanujan Conjectures for congruence subgroups of arithmetic groups, and approximations that have been proven towards them, are central to many diophantine applications. Recently analogous results have been established for quite general subgroups of GL(n,Z) called  "thin groups ". We will describe some of these and review some of their applications (mainly diophantine) as well as the ubiquity of thin groups.

A curve is a one dimensional space cut out by polynomial equations. In particular, one can consider curves over finite fields, which means the polynomial equations should have coefficients in some finite field and that points on the curve are given by values of the variables in the finite field that satisfy the given polynomials. A basic question is how many points such a curve has, and for a family of curves one can study the distribution of this statistic. We will give concrete examples of families in which this distribution is known or predicted, and give a sense of the different kinds of mathematics that are used to study different families.

Let $\chi$ be a totally odd character of a totally real number field. In 1981, B. Gross formulated a p-adic analogue of a conjecture of Stark which expresses the leading term at s=0 of the p-adic L-function attached to $\chi\omega$ as a product of a regulator and an algebraic number. Recently, Dasgupta-Darmon-Pollack proved Gross' conjecture in the rank one case under two assumptions: that Leopoldt's conjecture holds for F and p, and a certain technical condition when there is a unique prime above p in F. After giving some background and outlining their proof, I will explain how to remove both conditions, thus giving an unconditional proof of the conjecture. If there is extra time I will explain an application to the Iwasawa Main Conjecture which comes out of the proof, and make a few remarks on the higher rank case.