Part I

I will discuss the genus 0 Gromov-Witten theory of Hilb(C^2,n) and the system of equivalences relating this theory to local curves and the orbifold quantum cohomology of the symmetric product of C^2. These results, now 10 years old, will be presented from the current point of view of semisimple CohFTs and the Givental-Teleman classification.

Professor Rahul Pandharipande is a leading expert in algebraic geometry and related fields. He got his Bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1990 and earned his Ph.D. in 1994 under Joe Harris from Harvard University. After spending four years at the University of Chicago, he moved to Caltech where he stayed till 2001. He became professor at Princeton University in 2002. He then moved to Europe in 2010, visiting IST Lisbon for a year and joining ETH Zurich in 2011.

He has received many academic honors and awards including Fellowships from the Sloan Foundation (1999) and the Packard Foundation (2000), the Compositio Prize (2009), the Clay Research Award (2013), and the Infosys Prize (2013). He was an invited speaker at the ICM 2002 in Beijing, and will be a plenary speaker at the ICM 2018 in Rio de Janeiro.