This week, Wednesday at 12:00, U. Haifa Topology & Geometry seminar on January 22, 2020
Geometry & Topology Seminar
Speaker: Karl Christ (Ben Gurion University)
Topic: Severi problem and tropical geometry
Place: Room 614 in the Science & Education Building
Time: 12:00
Date: Wednesday, January 22, 2020
Abstract:
The classical Severi problem is to show that the space of reduced and irreducible plane curves of fixed geometric genus and degree is irreducible. In case of characteristic zero, this longstanding problem was settled by Harris in 1986. In the first part of my talk I will give a brief overview of the ideas involved. Then I will describe a tropical approach to studying degenerations of plane curves, which is the main ingredient to a new proof of irreducibility obtained in collaboration with Xiang He and Ilya Tyomkin. The main feature of the construction is that it works in positive characteristic, where the other known techniques fail.
