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Galois Seminar

Friday, February 9, 2018 - 3:15pm

Benjamin Collas

Univ. Bayreuth

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL 4N30

The moduli spaces of curves, via the arithmetic of the Knudsen-Mumford
stratification and their étale fundamental groups representation, have a
long tradition in the study of the absolute Galois group of rationals.
This led in particular to the creation of Grothendieck-Teichmüller theory,
that in return provides a group theoretic approach to arithmetic questions.
The goal of this talk is to present how the GT and arithmetic approaches
lead to new arithmetic results in the study of the stack stratification
given by the automorphism group of curves.

I will begin by showing how Grothendieck-Teichmüller theory, in relation
with explicit presentations and fundamental properties of the mapping class
group of surfaces of low genus, gives a result for the first stack strata.
I will then explain how the switch to a geometric context extends this
result to the generic cyclic strata in every genus.

My presentation will also illustrate how this stack arithmetic is organized
around two essential arithmetic questions i.e., for the moduli spaces to be
an étale K(\pi,1) and the rationality of irreducible components in Hurwitz
spaces.