Departmental Colloquium
Greg Baldi
CNRS & IAS
Typical vs. Atypical Intersections and Applications
Abstract: Many geometric spaces come equipped with a natural collection of special
submanifolds that reflect their internal symmetries. Examples include
abelian varieties with their sub-abelian varieties, locally symmetric
spaces with totally geodesic subspaces, period domains with sub–period
domains, and strata of abelian differentials with affine invariant
submanifolds.
In recent years, significant progress has been made in understanding
such structures through the lens of unlikely intersections and
functional transcendence. I will outline the general framework of
variations of Hodge structures and period domains, and explain how the
so-called completed Zilber–Pink philosophy provides a unifying way to
describe the qualitative behaviour of these special loci. This
perspective reveals deep connections between arithmetic geometry, Hodge
theory, and dynamical systems.
Friday November 7, 2025 at 3:00 PM in 636 SEO