
Tori in Positive Characteristic
Ananth Shankar, a mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study, presents a research seminar on tori in positive characteristic, part of the IAS Special Year Research Seminar series. He takes up questions of geometric unlikely intersections and transcendence for algebraic tori defined over fields of positive characteristic, an area where classical arithmetic geometry tools must be adapted to a setting without the usual characteristic-zero techniques. The talk reports on work in progress with Anup Dixit, Philip Engel, and Ruofan Jiang, laying out the conjectures under investigation and the partial results obtained so far. Delivered at IAS's Simonyi Hall to an audience of working researchers, the talk assumes graduate-level familiarity with algebraic groups and Diophantine geometry. It is a snapshot of an active research program rather than a survey, aimed at specialists tracking current developments in unlikely intersection theory over positive characteristic fields.