Akshay Venkatesh

Abstract:   I'll talk about some relations between analytic number theory, and questions about equidistribution on homogeneous spaces. (For our purposes, a homogeneous space is the quotient of a Lie group by a lattice, e.g . the space of lattices in R^n). I will first discuss old work of Kloosterman and Selberg in that light. I will then discuss an effective equidistribution result, joint with M. Einsiedler and G. Margulis, which applies in some higher rank instances.