Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Tom Church, Jordan Ellenberg and I recently discovered that the i-th Betti number of the space of configurations of n points on any manifold is given by a polynomial in n. Similarly for the moduli space of n-pointed genus g curves. Similarly for the dimensions of various spaces of homogeneous polynomials arising in algebraic combinatorics. Why? What do these disparate examples have in common? The goal of this talk will be to answer this question by explaining a simple underlying structure shared by these (and many other) examples in algebra and topology.