Brandeis-Harvard-MIT-Northeastern

JOINT MATHEMATICS COLLOQUIUM

 
Hodge integrals and tautological classes
on the moduli space of curves

 

Carel Faber

Oklahoma State University

 
 

MIT

Room 2-190

4:30 p.m., Thursday, March 30, 2000

 

Abstract:   By virtue of its universal property, the moduli space of curves carries a collection of algebraic intersection classes, the tautological or Mumford-Morita-Miller classes. It is important to understand the relations between these classes. According to the (conjectural) picture that is emerging, the subalgebras of tautological classes satisfy a form of Poincaré duality.

Hodge integrals are intersection numbers of tautological classes.  All these can be recursively computed by the work of Witten and Kontsevich, but this doesn't yield explicit formulas. Recent joint work with R. Pandharipande focuses on obtaining explicit ormulas for certain Hodge integrals via Gromov-Witten theory.


 
Home Web page:  Alexandru I. Suciu Created: March 19, 2000
Comments to:  alexsuciu@neu.edu URL: http://www.math.neu.edu/bhmn/faber.html