Tuesday, June 14, 2016

What is a functional equation?

Like all number theorists I am fascinated (to say the least) with the functional equation of 
classical  L-series. Years ago, I came up with a simple characterization of functional equations basically using only complex conjugation. This point being that, via a canonical change of variables (going back to Riemann), such L-series are, up to a nonzero scalar, given by real power series with the expectation that the zeroes are also real. In characteristic p the best one can hope is also that the zeroes will be as rational as the coefficients (though this statement needs to be modified to take care of standard factorizations as well as the great generality of Drinfeld's base rings A).

For those interested, a two page pdf can be found at the following link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwCbLZazAtweTmNIa1ZSc0h2UEE

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