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Algebraic Geometry Seminar


Spring 2026

Regular Day: Tuesday

Regular Time: 3:30PM - 4:30PM

Regular Location: LCB 215


Date Speaker Talk Information
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January 6


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January 13

Javier Carvajal-Rojas
CIMAT

How much of the geometry of a positive characteristic variety is encoded in its Frobenius? I'll give exact answers to this vague question in the toric case. For this, I'll introduce a Frobenius-theoretic cone sitting inside the pseudo-effective cone whose interaction with the other nef/ample/big cones determines the type of extremal contractions a variety can undergo. This leads to a geometric characterization of when the kernel of the Frobenius trace is; respectively, big, ample, and nef. This talk is based on my joint work with Emrezavci (EPFL), arXiv:2506.02994.
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February 5

Aaron Bertram
Utah

Reider's Theorem is a remarkably precise criterion for very ampleness of line bundles of the form K_S + D on an algebraic surface. By using Bridgeland stability conditions and various theorems about the moduli spaces of stable objects, we can extract information about the birational geometry of the blow-up of the projective space |K_S + D|^vee along the surface, analogous to results of Thaddeus in the curve case. This is part of a program that I am working on with my graduate students in Utah and Macri's laboratory in Paris.
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February 10

TBA

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February 17

Marta Benozzo
Universite Paris-Saclay

An important problem in birational geometry is trying to relate in a meaningful way the canonical bundles of the source and the base of a fibration. The first instance of such a formula is Kodaira's canonical bundle formula for surfaces which admit a fibration with elliptic fibres. It describes the relation between the canonical bundles in terms of the singularities of the fibres and their j-invariants. In higher dimension, we do not have an equivalent of the j-invariant, but we can still define a moduli part. Over fields of characteristic 0, positivity properties of the moduli part have been studied using variations of Hodge structures. Recently, the problem has been addressed with the minimal model program for foliations, which is known to fail in positive characteristic. In this talk I will explain an approach to the canonical bundle formula which adapts these methods in positive characteristic.
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February 24

TBA

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March 3

TBA

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March 10


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March 17

TBA

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March 24

Zhijia Zang
NYU

Let X be a variety carrying a generically free regular action from a group G. We say X is G-unirational if there exists a dominant G-equivariant rational map from a linear G-representation V to X. This notion is closely related to unirationality over non-closed fields and the group cohomology of G. In this talk, I will explain these relations and study G-unirationality on some Fano threefolds and toric threefolds. This is joint work with Yuri Tschinkel and Ivan Cheltsov.
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March 31

TBA

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April 2

Vasudevan Srinivas
SUNY Buffalo and TIFR

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April 3

Vasudevan Srinivas
SUNY Buffalo and TIFR

This talk will discuss some results on etale fundamental groups of varieties over an algebraically closed field of characteristic p > 0, based on joint work with Hélène Esnault and other coauthors. One result, along with Mark Schusterman, is that the tame fundamental group is finitely presented for such a variety which is the complement of an SNC divisor in a smooth projective variety. A second, along with Jakob Stix, is to give an obstruction for a smooth projective variety to admit a lifting to characteristic 0, in terms of the structure of its etale fundamental group as a profinite group. We will finally touch on some open questions.
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April 7

Y.P. Lee
Academia Sinica and Utah

Among the generalized cohomology theories associated to 1-dimensional (formal) groups are ordinary cohomology (G_a), complex K-theory (G_m), and elliptic cohomology (elliptic curve). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, physicists initiated quantum cohomology (Gromov-Witten theory) as the enumerative geometry associated with ordinary cohomology. A decade later, A. Givental and I established quantum K-theory. In this joint work with E. Bouaziz and I. Huq-Kuruvilla, I will report on recent (small) progress regarding the definition of the enumerative geometry of elliptic cohomology.
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April 14

TBA

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April 21

TBA