Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The hyperelliptic Torelli group of a genus g reference surface S_g is the subgroup of the mapping class group whose elements both commute with a fixed hyperelliptic involution of S_g and act trivially on the integral homology of S_g . This group is an important object in geometric topology and group theory, and also in algebraic geometry, where it appears as the fundamental group of the moduli space of genus g hyperelliptic curves with a homology framing. In this talk, we summarize what is known about the (infinite) topology of these moduli spaces, describe a few open problems, and report on some recent partial progress.

The Grothendieck ring of varieties is defined to be the free abelian group generated by k-varieties, modulo the relation that for any closed subvariety Y of a variety X, we impose the relation that [X] = [Y] + [X \ Y]; the ring structure is defined by [X][Y] = [X x Y]. Last December two longstanding questions about the Grothendieck ring of varieties were answered: 1. If two varieties X and Y are piecewise isomorphic then they are equal in the Grothendieck ring; does the converse hold? 2. Is the class of the affine line a zero divisor? Both questions were answered by Borisov, who constructed an element in the kernel of multiplication by the affine line; coincidentally, the proof also constructed two varieties whose classes in the Grothendieck ring are the same but which are not piecewise isomorphic. In this talk we will investigate these questions further by constructing a topological analog of the Grothendieck ring and analyzing its higher homotopy groups. Using this extra structure we will sketch a proof that Borisov's coincidence is not a coincidence at all: that any element in the annihilator of the Lefschetz motive can be represented by a difference of varieties which are equal in the Grothendieck ring but not piecewise isomorphic.

Understanding the stable homotopy groups of spheres is one of the great challenges of algebraic topology. They form a ring which, despite its simple definition, carries an amazing amount of structure. A famous theorem of Hopkins and Ravenel states that it is filtered by simpler rings called the chromatic layers. This point of view organizes the homotopy groups into periodic families and reveals patterns. There are many structural conjectures about the chromatic filtration. I will talk about one of these conjectures, the \emph{chromatic splitting conjecture}, which concerns the gluing data between the different layers of the chromatic filtration.

The theory of étale cohomology provides a bridge between two seemingly unrelated subjects: the homology of braid groups (topology) and the number of points on algebraic varieties over finite fields (arithmetic). Using this bridge, we study two problems, one from topology and one from arithmetic. First, we compute the homology of the braid groups with coefficients in the Burau representation. Then, we apply the topological result to calculate the expected number of points on a random superelliptic curve over finite fields.