Boston College - TCD Mathematics Colloquium

The first talk will be at 2:30pm by Sol Friedberg of Boston College Title: Introduction to the Langlands program Abstract: The Langlands program is at the center of modern number theory and representation theory. In this talk I will give a non-technical introduction to the Langlands program and a brief description of some recent progress. The second talk will be at 4pm by Marvin Hahn of TCD Title: An invitation to tropical enumerative geometry Abstract: In this talk, we will give an introduction to tropical geometry and its applications to enumerative geometry. Tropical geometry is a relatively new field of mathematics, which may be viewed as a combinatorial shadow of algebraic geometry. Employing degeneration techniques, it allows to transform questions about the enumeration of curves into combinatorial counts of graphs. We will illustrate this idea to obtain a combinatorial description of spin Hurwitz numbers, which enumerate holomorphic maps between spin curves while taking the parity of the involved spin structures into account. This talk is based on work in progress with Loujean Cobigo.