The Ohio State University

VIGRE at The Ohio State University
--- Invitation to Research ---

Department of Mathematics

p-adic analysis [Spring 2007]

Warren Sinnott

The familiar construction of the real numbers from the rationals by adjoining limits of Cauchy sequences is not the only way to "complete" the rationals; other notions of the "size" of a rational number can be used. We will describe how to construct the p-adic numbers Q_p (p any prime number) and illustrate how many familiar results and constructions from calculus and analysis also hold in Q_p.