Given some class of "geometric spaces", we can make a ring as follows. Additive structure: when U is an open subset a space X,  [X] = [U] + [X - U]. Multiplicative structure:  [X][Y] = [XxY]. In the algebraic setting, this ring (the "Grothendieck ring of varieties") contains surprising structure, connecting geometry to arithmetic and topology.  I will discuss some remarkable
statements about this ring (both known and conjectural), and present new statements (again, both known and conjectural).  A motivating example will be polynomials in one variable. This is joint work with Melanie Matchett Wood.

In this talk I will give several perspectives on the role of
quasi-abelian categories in analytic geometry. In particular, I will 
explain why a certain completion of the category of Banach spaces is a
convenient setting for studying sheaves of topological vector spaces on
complex manifolds. Time permitting, I will also argue why this category
may be a good candidate for a functor of points approach to (derived)
analytic geometry.

I will collect some results about the study of topological and algebraic invariants of this moduli space by using non-abelian Hodge theory. Some keywords are: Higgs bundles, Mixed Hodge structures.

Topological Quantum Field Theories are functors from a category of bordisms of manifolds to (usually) some categorification of the notion of vector spaces. In this talk we will first discuss why mathematicians are interested in these in general and an overview of the relevant notions. After this we will have a closer look at the example of functors from the bordism category of 1-, 2- and 3-dimensional manifolds equipped with principal G-bundles, for G a finite group, to nice categorifications of vector spaces.

In this talk, I will review an inverse scattering construction of interacting integrable quantum field theories on two-dimensional Minkowski space and its ramifications. The construction starts from a given two-body S-matrix instead of a classical Lagrangean, and defines corresponding quantum field theories in a non-perturbative manner in two steps: First certain semi-local fields are constructed explicitly, and then the analysis of the local observable content is carried out with operator-algebraic methods (Tomita-Takesaki modular theory, split subfactor inclusions). I will explain how this construction solves the inverse scattering problem for a large family of interactions, and also discuss perspectives on extensions of this program to higher dimensions and/or non-integrable theories.

In this talk I will present some recent work on the amplituhedron formulation of scattering amplitudes. Very recently it has been conjectured that amplitudes in planar N=4 sYM are nothing else but the volume of a completely new mathematical object, called amplituhedron, which generalises the positive Grassmannian. After a review of the main ingredients which will be used, I will discuss some of the questions which remain open in this framework. I will then describe a new direction which promises to solve these issues and compute the volume of the amplituhedron at tree level.