Maltese expert involved in massive new mathematical database

Mathematicians from 12 countries – including one with Maltese heritage - have launched a massive database of mathematical objects including elliptic curves, and a special class of zeroes, that has already been deployed to protect bank accounts and solve mathematical problems in physics and in prime number theory.

Professor John Cremona at the University of Warwick, whose family is Maltese, is the lead UK researcher on a project that has catalogued over a billion mathematical items in six terabytes of data including: “elliptic curves”, “Modular forms” “L-functions” and “non-trivial” zeros, in a research initiative known as the L-Functions and Modular Forms Database Project which can be found at: http://www.lmfdb.org/

The University of Warwick said these mathematical items are a significant part of the information that underpins what are known as L-functions. These help shape our understanding of prime numbers and key parts of mathematical physics, and they also power much of the way we protect our online bank accounts, use and understand cryptography, and underpin web security.

Elliptic curves arise naturally in many parts of mathematics, and can be described by a simple cubic...