Chandrasekhar Hall

x^n + x + a

V Kumar Murty

University of Toronto

This family of polynomials has many nice properties. In
particular, we will discuss their irreducibility, their discriminants,
and their Galois groups, and why they are relevant in coding theory
and in cryptography. There are many interesting open problems about the
prime divisors of the discriminants. I will describe joint work with
undergraduate student Shuyang Shen on some of these questions in which we
explore consequences of the ABC conjecture.