Geometry Seminar - Abstracts

Talk

Tuesday 8 March 2022, 16:00-17:00 in HG03.082
Ben Moonen (RU)
The Coleman-Oort Conjecture

Abstract

A long-standing conjecture of Coleman says that if we fix a genus \(g > 3\), there are only finitely many complex curves \(C\) of genus \(g\), up to isomorphism, for which the Jacobian \(\mathrm{Jac}(C)\) is an abelian variety of CM type - read this as: having a very large ring of endomorphisms. (If you prefer, replace 'curve' by 'compact Riemann surface'; it makes no difference.) I will explain why this is known to be false if \(3 < g < 8\) and completely open otherwise, and why this is equivalent to another conjecture (Coleman-Oort) about subvarieties of moduli spaces. The mathematics that goes into this comes from many sides: from topology and differential geometry, Lie theory, number theory and transcendence theory, algebraic geometry in characteristic \(p\), etc.; but I'll keep the talk as elementary as possible.


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