L4

This talk will be a brief introduction to some standard conjectures surrounding motivic L-functions, which might be viewed as the arithmetic motivation for Langlands reciprocity.

We will define the Ran space as well as Ran space versions of some of the prestacks we've already seen, and explain what is meant by the homology of a prestack. Following Gaitsgory and possibly Drinfeld, we'll show how the Ran space machinery can be used to prove that the space of rational maps is homologically contractible.

This talk will be an introduction to the notion of D-modules on

prestacks. We will begin by discussing Grothendieck's definition of

crystals of quasi-coherent sheaves on a smooth scheme X, and briefly

indicate how the category of such objects is equivalent to that of

modules over the sheaf of differential operators on X. We will then

explain what we mean by a prestack and define the category of

quasi-coherent sheaves on them. Finally, we consider how the

crystalline approach may be used to give a suitable generalization

of D-modules to this derived setting.

Infinity categories simultaneously generalize topological spaces and categories. As a result, their study benefits from a combination of techniques from homotopy theory and category theory. While the theory of ordinary categories provides a suitable context to analyze objects up to isomorphism (e.g. abelian groups), the theory of infinity categories provides a reasonable framework to study objects up to a weaker concept of identification (e.g. complexes of abelian groups). In the talk, we will introduce infinity categories from scratch, mention some of the fundamental results, and try to illustrate some features in concrete examples.

Hamiltonian reduction arose as a mechanism for reducing complexity of systems in mechanics, but it also provides a tool for constructing complicated but interesting objects from simpler ones. I will illustrate how this works in representation theory and algebraic geometry via examples. I will describe a new structure theory, motivated by Hamiltonian reduction (and in particular the Morse theory that results), for some categories (of D-modules) of interest to representation theorists. I will then explain how this implies a modified form of "hyperkahler Kirwan surjectivity" for the cohomology of certain Hamiltonian reductions. The talk will not assume that members of the audience know the meaning of any of the above-mentioned terms. The talk is based on joint work with K. McGerty.

The goal of this second talk is to study the existence of global jet differentials. Thanks to the algebraic Morse inequalities, the problem reduces to the computation of a certain Chern number on the Demailly tower of projectivized jet bundles. We will describe the significant simplification due to Berczi consisting in integrating along the fibers of this tower by mean of an iterated residue formula. Beside the original argument coming from equivariant geometry, we will explain our alternative proof of such a formula and we will particularly be interested in the interplay between the two approaches.