Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The theory of non-Archimedean analytic spaces closely parallels that of complex analytic spaces, with many theorems holding in both situations. I'll illustrate this principle by giving a survey of the structure theory of analytic curves over non-Archimedean fields, and comparing them to classical Riemann surfaces. I'll draw plenty of pictures and discuss topology, pair-of-pants decompositions, etc.

We discuss a simple construction a finite dimensional algebra("bipartite algebra") to a bipartite oriented graph, and explain how thestudy of the representation theory of these algebras produces acategorification of the cut and flow lattices of graphs. I'll also mentionwhy we suspect that bipartite algebras should arise naturally in severalother contexts. This is joint work with Anthony Licata.

Let $C=\{f(z_0,z_1,z_2)=0\}$ be a complex plane curve with ADE singularities. Let $m$ be a divisor of the degree of $f$ and let $H$ be the hyperelliptic curve $y^2=x^m+f(s,t,1)$ defined over $\mathbb{C}(s,t)$. In this talk we explain how one can determine the Mordell-Weil rank of the Jacobian of $H$ effectively. For this we use some results on the Alexander polynomial of $C$. This extends a result by Cogolludo-Augustin and Libgober for the case where $C$ is a curve with ordinary cusps. In the second part we discuss how one can do a similar approach over fields like $\mathbb{Q}(s,t)$ and $\mathbb{F}(s,t)$.

Let X be a connected smooth projective variety over Q. If X has a Q point, then X must have local points, i.e. points over the reals and over the p-adic completions Q_p. However, local solubility is often not sufficient. Manin showed that quadratic reciprocity together with higher reciprocity laws can obstruct the existence of a Q point (a global point) even when there exist local points. We will give an overview of this obstruction (in the case of quadratic reciprocity) and then show that for certain surfaces, this reciprocity obstruction can be viewed in a geometric manner. More precisely, we will show that for degree 4 del Pezzo surfaces, Manin's obstruction to the existence of a rational point is equivalent to the surface being fibered into genus 1 curves, each of which fail to be locally solvable.