Enumerative Geometry Beyond Numbers
Date: 16 January - 25 May 2018
Location: MSRI
Event type: Extended Format
Organisers: Mina Aganagic (Berkeley), Denis Auroux (Berkeley), Jim Bryan (British Columbia), Andrei Okounkov (Columbia), Balazs Szendroi (Oxford)
Traditional enumerative geometry asks certain questions to which the expected answer is a number: for instance, the number of lines incident with two points in the plane (1, Euclid), or the number of twisted cubic curves on a quintic threefold (317 206 375). It has however been recognized for some time that the numerics is often just the tip of the iceberg: a deeper exploration reveals interesting geometric, topological, representation-, or knot-theoretic structures. This semester-long program will be devoted to these hidden structures behind enumerative invariants, concentrating on the core fields where these questions start: algebraic and symplectic geometry.
Professor Hiraku Nakajima (Kyoto) has been appointed as a Clay Senior Scholar to participate in this program.