Monday 5 May 2025
17:00–18:30*

Anh Trong Nam Hoang (Northeastern University) — Homology of Hurwitz spaces via Fox-Neuwirth cells

The study of the homology of Hurwitz spaces, certain finite covers of unordered configuration spaces of the plane, and their generalizations plays a fundamental role in the recent flurry of remarkable work connecting topology and number theory, such as Ellenberg-Venkatesh-Westerland, Ellenberg-Landesman, and Landesman-Levy. Recently, Ellenberg-Tran-Westerland introduced a new approach to study the homology of Hurwitz spaces, starting with integrating the classical Fox-Neuwirth stratification of configuration spaces into the twisted setting. In this talk, we will explain their framework and describe how one might expand it to study the homology of some generalized Hurwitz spaces, which has applications in number theory.

* Eastern European Time, i.e. UTC+2 in winter and UTC+3 in summer.