Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

A fundamental problem in analytic number theory is to calculate the maximal value of L-functions at a given point. For L-functions associated to quadratic Dirichlet characters at s = 1, the upper bounds and Ω-results of Littlewood differ by a factor of 2, and it is a long-standing (and still unsolved) problem to find out which one is closer to the truth. The important work of Granville and Soundararajan, who model the distribution of L(1, χ) by the distribution of random Euler products L(1, X) for random variables X(p) attached to each prime, shed more light to the question. We use similar techniques to study the distribution of L(1, χ) for cubic Dirichlet characters. Unlike the quadratic case, there is an asymmetry between lower and upper bounds for the cubic case, and small values are less probable than large values. This is a joint work with P. Darbar, M. Lalin and A. Lumley.