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Penn Mathematics Colloquium

Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - 4:30pm

Linda Chen

Swarthmore College

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL A6

It is a classical problem to count the number of geometric objects satisfying various conditions. In the 1990s, Kontsevich obtained a beautiful formula for the number of rational plane curves of degree d passing through 3d-1 general points by using Gromov-Witten theory of the projective plane. More recently, orbifold Gromov-Witten theory has been used to study generalizations of the McKay correspondence and crepant resolutions. I will discuss these developments, as well as give an approach to further problems in enumerative geometry using orbifold quantum cohomology.