"Nicolae Popescu" Number Theory Seminar

What we call today Nicolae Popescu Number Theory Seminar is the latest instance of a very long list of scientific seminars organized and lively coached by this special mathematician who was the great Scientist, Professor and Mentor, Nicolae Popescu. The first form of this type of seminars started around the year 1960, when Nicolae Popescu was a student at the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics, University of Bucharest. In the spring of 2010 Nicolae Popescu made his last presentation in his Seminar (he passed away in July 2010).

In this almost 50 years old Seminar, many talented generations of students and young researchers learned from him deep problems and higher results in Algebra and Number Theory. Many of these students and young researchers became great mathematicians, professors of mathematics and appreciated senior researchers in important universities and research centers all over the world. An almost complete list of them can be found in the first memorial book Nicolae Popescu, Man, Mathematician and Mentor, published by E. L. Popescu in the Publishing House of the University of Bucharest, Bucharest, 2011 (in Romanian for the moment). Here one can also find many other impressive facts about this great personality of the Romanian mathematical community.

Some of the most important topics originally developed at these seminaries initiated by Nicolae Popescu are: Theory of Categories with Applications to Rings and Modules, Theory of Rings, Modules and Homological Algebra, Representation Theory, Fields and Polynomials, Algebraic Numbers, Algebraic Functions and Valuation Theory, Theory of Numbers (algebraic, analytic, p-adic analytic), p-adic Analysis, Rigid Analytic Geometry, Algebraic Topology, Algebraic Geometry, Commutative Algebra, K-Theory, Class-Field Theory.

Besides being a place where original research was exposed, this Seminar offered to many students and young mathematicians the opportunity to learn Number Theory by direct presentations, live discussions and by solving problems and exercises from some basic famous books authored by Shafarevich and Borevich, Weber, Weil, Artin, Hasse, Serre, Zariski and Samuel, Chevalley, to name but a few. “Read the Masters” was a permanent advice of this great mathematician, Nicolae Popescu.