
Lang-Trotter Phenomena and Unlikely Intersections
Georgios Papas, of the Institute for Advanced Study, presents a research talk in the Special Year Learning Seminar arguing that the Lang-Trotter conjecture for pairs of elliptic curves implies new cases of the Zilber-Pink conjecture for curves in three-dimensional abelian varieties. He contrasts his result with earlier work on curves in higher-dimensional settings, stressing that his argument does not require any assumption about intersections with the boundary, which means it applies even to compact curves. The proof leans on Yves André's G-functions method, and Papas walks through how that analytic machinery connects the arithmetic statement about elliptic curve pairs to the unlikely intersections framework. The work is joint and in progress with Chris Daw, and Papas presents it as an open research problem rather than a finished textbook result, giving the audience the current state of the argument and where it still needs to be completed. Delivered at Simonyi Hall, the talk assumes graduate-level familiarity with arithmetic geometry.