This volume contains refereed papers related to the lectures and talks given at a conference held in Siena (Italy) in June 2004. Also included are research papers that grew out of discussions among the participants and their collaborators. All the papers are research papers, but some of them also contain expository sections which aim to update the state of the art on the classical subject of special projective varieties and their applications and new trends like phylogenetic algebraic geometry.

The topic of secant varieties and the classification of defective varieties is central and ubiquitous in this volume. Besides the intrinsic interest of the subject, it turns out that it is also relevant in other fields of mathematics like expressions of polynomials as sums of powers, polynomial interpolation, rank tensor computations, Bayesian networks, algebraic statistics and number theory.

The proceedings from the Abel Symposium on Geometry of Moduli, held at Svinøya Rorbuer, Svolvær in Lofoten, in August 2017, present both survey and research articles on the recent surge of developments in understanding moduli problems in algebraic geometry. Written by many of the main contributors to this evolving subject, the book provides a comprehensive collection of new methods and the various directions in which moduli theory is advancing. These include the geometry of moduli spaces, non-reductive geometric invariant theory, birational geometry, enumerative geometry, hyper-kähler geometry, syzygies of curves and Brill-Noether theory and stability conditions. Moduli theory is ubiquitous in algebraic geometry, and this is reflected in the list of moduli spaces addressed in this volume: sheaves on varieties, symmetric tensors, abelian differentials, (log) Calabi-Yau varieties, points on schemes, rational varieties, curves, abelian varieties and hyper-Kähler manifolds.

This volume contains refereed papers related to the lectures and talks given at a conference held in Siena (Italy) in June 2004. Also included are research papers that grew out of discussions among the participants and their collaborators. All the papers are research papers, but some of them also contain expository sections which aim to update the state of the art on the classical subject of special projective varieties and their applications and new trends like phylogenetic algebraic geometry.

The topic of secant varieties and the classification of defective varieties is central and ubiquitous in this volume. Besides the intrinsic interest of the subject, it turns out that it is also relevant in other fields of mathematics like expressions of polynomials as sums of powers, polynomial interpolation, rank tensor computations, Bayesian networks, algebraic statistics and number theory.

The proceedings from the Abel Symposium on Geometry of Moduli, held at Svinøya Rorbuer, Svolvær in Lofoten, in August 2017, present both survey and research articles on the recent surge of developments in understanding moduli problems in algebraic geometry. Written by many of the main contributors to this evolving subject, the book provides a comprehensive collection of new methods and the various directions in which moduli theory is advancing. These include the geometry of moduli spaces, non-reductive geometric invariant theory, birational geometry, enumerative geometry, hyper-kähler geometry, syzygies of curves and Brill-Noether theory and stability conditions. Moduli theory is ubiquitous in algebraic geometry, and this is reflected in the list of moduli spaces addressed in this volume: sheaves on varieties, symmetric tensors, abelian differentials, (log) Calabi-Yau varieties, points on schemes, rational varieties, curves, abelian varieties and hyper-Kähler manifolds.