This is a report on joint work with Martijn Kool. 

Recently, Marian-Oprea-Pandharipande established a generalization of Lehn’s conjecture for Segre numbers associated to Hilbert schemes of points on surfaces. Extending work of Johnson, they provided a conjectural correspondence between Segre and Verlinde numbers. For surfaces with holomorphic 2-form, we propose conjectural generalizations of their results to moduli spaces of stable sheaves of higher rank. 

Using Mochizuki’s formula, we derive a universal function which expresses virtual Segre and Verlinde numbers of surfaces with holomorphic 2-form in terms of Seiberg- Witten invariants and intersection numbers on products of Hilbert schemes of points. We use this to  verify our conjectures in examples. 

We study the minimum Wasserstein distance from the empirical measure to a space of probability measures satisfying linear constraints. This statistic can naturally be used in a wide range of applications, for example, optimally choosing uncertainty sizes in distributionally robust optimization, optimal regularization, testing fairness, martingality, among many other statistical properties. We will discuss duality results which recover the celebrated Kantorovich-Rubinstein duality when the manifold is sufficiently rich and associated test statistics as the sample size increases. We illustrate how this relaxation can beat the statistical curse of dimensionality often associated to empirical Wasserstein distances.

The talk builds on joint work with S. Ghosh, Y. Kang, K. Murthy, M. Squillante, and N. Si.