Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

What is the probability that a random integer is squarefree? Prime? How many number fields of degree d are there with discriminant at most X? What does the class group of a random quadratic field look like? These questions, and many more like them, are part of the very active subject of arithmetic statistics. Many aspects of the subject are well-understood, but many more remain the subject of conjectures, by Cohen-Lenstra, Malle, Bhargava, Batyrev-Manin, and others. In this talk, I explain what arithmetic statistics looks like when we start from the field Fq(x) of rational functions over a finite field instead of the field Q of rational numbers. The analogy between function fields and number fields has been a rich source of insights throughout the modern history of number theory. In this setting, the analogy reveals a surprising relationship between conjectures in number theory and conjectures in topology about stable cohomology of moduli spaces, especially spaces related to Artin's braid group. I will discuss some recent work in this area, in which new theorems about the topology of moduli spaces lead to proofs of arithmetic conjectures over function fields, and to new, topologically motivated questions about counting arithmetic objects.

The classical theory of complex multiplication predicts the existence of certain points called Heegner points defined over quadratic imaginary fields on elliptic curves (the curves themselves are defined over the rational numbers). Henri Darmon observed that under certain conditions, the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture predicts the existence of points of infinite order defined over real quadratic fields on elliptic curves, and under such conditions, came up with a conjectural construction of such points, which he called Stark-Heegner points. Later, he and others (especially Greenberg and Gartner) extended this construction to many other number fields, and the points constructed have often been called Darmon points. We will outline a general construction of Stark-Heegner/Darmon points defined over quadratic extensions of totally real fields (subject to some mild restrictions) that combines past constructions; this is joint work with Mak Trifkovic.

Rota's conjecture predicts that the coefficients of the characteristic polynomial of a matroid form a log-concave sequence. I will talk about Rota's conjecture and several related topics: the proof of the conjecture for representable matroids, a relation to the missing axiom, and a search for a new discrete Riemannian geometry based on the tropical Laplacian. This is an ongoing joint effort with Eric Katz.

Matroids are widely used objects in combinatorics; they arise naturally in many situations featuring vector configurations over a field. But in some contexts the natural data are elements in a module over some other ring, and there is more than simply a matroid to be extracted. In joint work with Luca Moci, we have defined the notion of matroid over a ring to fill this niche. I will discuss two examples of situations producing these enriched objects, one relating to subtorus arrangements producing matroids over the integers, and one related to tropical geometry producing matroids over a valuation ring. Time permitting, I'll also discuss the analogue of the Tutte invariant.