Speaker:    Madeline Brant  (Brown University)

Title:  Topology of moduli spaces via combinatorics

Abstract:

Deligne connects the weight-zero compactly supported cohomology of a moduli space to the combinatorics of its compactifications. This gives a method for using combinatorics to compute a piece of the cohomology of a moduli space. In this talk, we discuss this method for the cases of the moduli space of abelian varieties and the moduli space of n-marked hyperelliptic curves.