Arithmetic and Representations of Fundamental Groups

I gave a talk at the IPAM conference “Braids, Resolvent Degree, and Hilbert’s 13th Problem” this past Thursday. The conference was really inspiring — I enjoyed all the talks, but I’d in particular like to recommend Jesse Wolfson’s three talks for a really excellent overview of Hilbert’s 13th problem, Mark Kisin’s talk on recent progress he, Jesse, and Benson Farb have made on the problem, Laure Flapan’s talk for a fascinating overview of her work on Kodaira fibered surfaces (along with some intriguing open questions about them), and Alexander Duncan’s talk on the numerology of essential dimensions of small finite simple groups. Basically, I’m pretty into resolvent degree right now.

My talk, on “Arithmetic and Representations of Fundamental Groups” is below — it starts about 5 minutes in to the video.

Daniel Litt - Institute for Advanced Study, Mathematics We discuss geometric (and function field) analogues of several well-known theorems and conjectures in number theory, including Mazur's torsion theorem, the Fontaine-Mazur finiteness conjecture, and the Frey-Mazur conjecture. We use anabelian techniques to prove these function field analogues, including some results which are new for Riemann surfaces.