Seminar Dessins d'enfants and compact Riemann surfaces

Course Information

Content

Dessin d’enfants is the french word for children’s drawing and means a type of bipartite graph embedded in a compact oriented surface. One of the results you can learn about in this seminar says that a dessin imposes a canonical complex structure on the surrounding surface, and that the resulting compact Riemann surface is actually an algebraic curve which can be defined over the field of algebraic numbers. This simple construction provides a fascinating link between topology, complex function theory, algebraic geometry and number theory.

Literature

During the seminar we will mainly follow the book:

  • Girondo, González-Diez, Introduction to compact Riemann surfaces and dessins d’enfants

Prerequisites

 

Elemente der Topologie or Funktionentheorie (Master) are helpful but not required. Ideally, participants hear Algebraic Geometry at the same time.

Target audience

 

Master

Participants

 

12

Mode

 

Weekly talks

Language

 

English. Materials and preparation will be in English. Talks will preferably be held in English as well. Use the opportunity to practice your language skills!

Registration

by email before 18.07 to jeroen.sijsling(at)uni-ulm.de. Please mention study program, semester, and matriculation number.

Supervision