Abstract:
l will discuss the somewhat magical role that K3 surfaces and their moduli spaces play in Gromov-Witten and Donaldson-Thomas theory (starting from the Yau-Zaslow formula in the 1990's and continuing to the present (including recent results with G. Oberdieck)).


Bio-Sketch:

Professor Rahul Pandharipande is a world-renowned mathematician working on algebraic geometry and related fields. His particular interests concern moduli spaces, enumerative invariants associated to moduli spaces, such as Gromov-Witten invariants and Donaldson-Thomas invariants, and the cohomology of the moduli space of curves. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1994 under the supervision of Joe Harris. After teaching at the University of Chicago and the California Institute of Technology, he joined the faculty as Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University in 2002. In 2011, he moved to Switzerland and became a Professor at ETH Zürich. Professor Pandharipande received the Compositio Prize in 2010, Clay Research Award and Infosys Prize for Mathematics in 2013. He is an invited speaker for ICM 2002 and a plenary speaker for ICM 2018. He currently serves as managing editor of Inventiones Mathematicae.