A pair of elliptic curves is said to be $N$-congruent if their mod $N$ Galois representations are isomorphic. We will discuss a construction of the moduli spaces of $N$-congruent elliptic curves, due to Kani--Schanz, and describe how this can be exploited to compute explicit equations. Finally we will outline a proof that there exist infinitely many pairs of elliptic curves with isomorphic mod $12$ Galois representations, building on previous work of Chen and Fisher (in the case where the underlying isomorphism of torsion subgroups respects the Weil pairing).

The Riemann hypothesis (RH) is one of the great open problems in
mathematics. It arose from the study of prime numbers in an analytic
context, and—as often occurs in mathematics—developed analogies in an
algebraic setting, leading to the influential Weil conjectures. RH for
curves over finite fields was proven in the 1940’s by Weil using
algebraic-geometric methods, and later reproven by Stepanov and
Bombieri by elementary means. In this talk, we use RH for curves to
prove the Weil bound for certain (Kloosterman) exponential sums, which
in turn is a fundamental tool in the study of prime numbers.

Isogeny-based cryptography is a candidate for post-quantum cryptography. The underlying hardness of isogeny-based protocols is the problem of computing endomorphism rings of supersingular elliptic curves, which is equivalent to the path-finding problem on the supersingular isogeny graph. Can path-finding be reduced to knowing just one endomorphism? An endomorphism gives an explicit orientation of a supersingular elliptic curve. In this talk, we use the volcano structure of the oriented supersingular isogeny graph to take ascending/descending/horizontal steps on the graph and deduce path-finding algorithms to an initial curve. This is joint work with Sarah Arpin, Kristin E. Lauter, Renate Scheidler, Katherine E. Stange and Ha T. N. Tran.

The Lott-Sturm-Villani curvature-dimension condition CD(K,N) provides a synthetic notion for a metric measure space to have curvature bounded from below by K and dimension bounded from above by N. It was proved by Juillet that the CD(K,N) condition is not satisfied in a large class of sub-Riemannian manifolds, for every choice of the parameters K and N. In a joint work with Tommaso Rossi, we extended this result to the setting of almost-Riemannian manifolds and finally it was proved in full generality by Rizzi and Stefani. In this talk I present the ideas behind the different strategies, discussing in particular their possible adaptation to the sub-Finsler setting. Lastly I show how studying the validity of the CD condition in sub-Finsler Carnot groups could help in proving rectifiability of CD spaces.