Galois groups in Enumerative Geometry and Applications
- Series
- School of Mathematics Colloquium
- Time
- Thursday, March 28, 2024 - 11:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
- Location
- Skiles 005
- Speaker
- Frank Sottile – Texas A&M University – sottile@tamu.edu
In 1870 Jordan explained how Galois theory can be applied to problems from enumerative geometry, with the group encoding intrinsic structure of the problem. Earlier Hermite showed the equivalence of Galois groups with geometric monodromy groups, and in 1979 Harris initiated the modern study of Galois groups of enumerative problems. He posited that a Galois group should be `as large as possible' in that it will be the largest group preserving internal symmetry in the geometric problem.
I will describe this background and discuss some work of many to compute, study, and use Galois groups of geometric problems, including those that arise in applications of algebraic geometry.