Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Mac Lane's technique of "inductive valuations" is over 80 years old, but has only recently been used to attack problems about arithmetic surfaces. We will give an explicit, hands-on introduction to the theory, requiring little background beyond the definition of a non-archimedean valuation. We will then outline how this theory is helpful for resolving "weak wild" quotient singularities of arithmetic surfaces, as well as for proving conductor-discriminant inequalities for higher genus curves. The first project is joint work with Stefan Wewers, and the second is joint work with Padmavathi Srinivasan.