CMSA Colloquium: Curve counting on surfaces and topological strings

CMSA EVENTS

Speaker:

Andrea Brini - University of Sheffield

Enumerative geometry is a venerable subfield of Mathematics, with roots dating back to Greek Antiquity and a present inextricably linked with developments in other domains. Since the early 90s, in particular, the interaction with String Theory has sent shockwaves through the subject, giving both unexpected new perspectives and a remarkably powerful, physics-motivated toolkit to tackle several traditionally hard questions in the field.
I will survey some recent developments in this vein for the case of enumerative invariants associated to a pair (X,D), with X a complex algebraic surface and D a singular anticanonical divisor in it. I will describe a surprising web of correspondences linking together several a priori distant classes of enumerative invariants associated to (X,D), including the log Gromov--Witten invariants of the pair, the Gromov--Witten invariants of an associated higher dimensional Calabi--Yau variety, the open Gromov--Witten invariants of certain special Lagrangians in toric Calabi--Yau threefolds, the Donaldson--Thomas theory of a class of symmetric quivers, and certain open and closed Gopakumar--Vafa-type invariants. I will also discuss how these correspondences can be effectively used to provide a complete closed-form solution to the calculation of all these invariants.

https://harvard.zoom.us/j/95767170359

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