Eduard Looijenga – författare

Mapping class groups and moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces were the topics of the Graduate Summer School at the 2011 IAS/Park City Mathematics Institute. This book presents the nine different lecture series comprising the summer school, covering a selection of topics of current interest. The introductory courses treat mapping class groups and Teichmuller theory. The more advanced courses cover intersection theory on moduli spaces, the dynamics of polygonal billiards and moduli spaces, the stable cohomology of mapping class groups, the structure of Torelli groups, and arithmetic mapping class groups. The courses consist of a set of intensive short lectures offered by leaders in the field, designed to introduce students to exciting, current research in mathematics. These lectures do not duplicate standard courses available elsewhere. The book should be a valuable resource for graduate students and researchers interested in the topology, geometry and dynamics of moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces and related topics.

The present volume, with contributions of R. Dijkgraaf, C. Faber, G. van der Geer, R. Rain, E. Looijenga, and F. Oort, originates from the Dutch Intercity Seminar on Moduli (year 1995-96). Some of the articles here were discussed, in preliminary form, in the seminar; others are completely new. Two introductory papers, on moduli of abelian varieties and on moduli of curves, accompany the articles. Topics include a stratification of a moduli space of abelian varieties in positive characteristic, and the calculation of the classes of the strata, tautological classes for moduli of abelian varieties as well as for moduli of curves, correspondences between moduli spaces of curves, locally symmetric families of curves and jaco­ bians, and the role of symmetric product spaces in quantum field theory, string theory and matrix theory. This Intercity Seminar is part of the long term project "Algebraic curves and Riemann surfaces: geometry, arithmetic and applications" , sponsored hy the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), that has been running since 1994. Its ancestry can be traced back to joint activities in the seventies (if not earlier), which as of 1980 had evolved into active biweekly research seminars. These have been a focal point of Dutch algebraic geometry and singularity theory since. We are grateful to NWO for its support for the project. C.F. thanks the Max-Planck-Institut fur Mathematik, Bonn, for support during the final stages of the preparation of this volume.