The moduli space of curves, first appearing in the work of Riemann in the 19th century, plays an important role in geometry. After an introduction to the moduli space, I will discuss recent directions in the study of tautological classes on the moduli space following ideas and conjectures of Mumford, Faber-Zagier, and Pixton. Cohomological Field Theories (CohFTs) play an important role. The talk is about the search for a cohomology calculus for the moduli space of curves parallel to what is known for better understood geometries.

A ``random stationary signal'', more formally known as a Gaussian stationary function, is a random function f:R-->R whose distribution is invariant under real shifts (hence stationary), and whose evaluation at any finite number of points is a centered Gaussian random vector (hence Gaussian). The mathematical study of these random functions goes back at least 75 years, with pioneering works by Kac, Rice and Wiener, who were motivated both by applications in engineering and by analytic questions about ``typical'' behavior in certain classes of functions.

Representation theory of non-compact real groups, such as SL(2,R), is a fundamental discipline with uses in harmonic analysis, number theory, physics, and more. This theory is analytical in nature, but in the course of the 20th century it was algebraized and geometrized (the key contributions are by Harish-Chandra for the former and by Beilinson-Bernstein for the latter). Roughly and generally speaking, algebraization strips layers from the objects of study until we are left with a bare skeleton, amenable to symbolic manipulation.

Numerous problems in extremal hypergraph theory ask to determine the maximal size of a k-uniform hypergraph on n vertices that does not contain an 'enlarged' copy H^+ of a fixed hypergraph H. These include well-known problems such as the Erdos-Sos 'forbidding one intersection' problem and the Frankl-Furedi 'special simplex' problem.

A finite graph is automatically also a metric space, but is there any interesting geometry to speak of? In this lecture I will try to convey the idea that indeed there is very interesting geometry to explore here. I will say something on the local side of this as well as on the global aspects. The k-local profile of a big graph G is the following distribution. You sample uniformly at random k vertices in G and observe the subgraph that they span. Question - which distributions can occur? We know some of the answer but by and large it is very open.

Consider a simplicial complex that allows for an embedding into R^d. How many faces of dimension d/2 or higher can it have? How dense can they be? This basic question goes back to Descartes. Using it and other rather fundamental combinatorial problems, I will motivate and introduce a version of Grothendieck's "standard conjectures" beyond positivity (which will be explored in detail in the Sunday Seminar). All notions used will be explained in the talk (I will make an effort to be very elementary)

In the early 1970’s, Hindman proved a beautiful theorem in additive Ramsey theory asserting that for any partition of the set of natural numbers into finitely many cells, there exists some infinite set such that all of its finite sums belong to a single cell. In this talk, we shall address generalizations of this statement to the realm of the uncountable. Among other things, we shall present a negative partition relation for the real line which simultaneously generalizes a recent theorem of Hindman, Leader and Strauss, and a classic theorem of Galvin and Shelah.