University of Sydney Algebra Seminar

David Smyth (ANU)

Friday 2nd May, 12:05-12:55pm, Place: 373

Birational Geometry of the Moduli Space of Stable Curves

In 1969, Deligne and Mumford constructed a natural projective compactification of the moduli space of curves. Since that time, a major problem in algebraic geometry has been understanding key birational invariants associated with this projective variety. I will give an overview of old and new work on this topic.