For each central essential hyperplane arrangement $\mathcal{A}$ over an algebraically closed field, let $Z_\mathcal{A}^{\hat\mu}(T)$ denote the Denef–Loeser motivic zeta function of $\mathcal{A}$ . We prove a formula expressing $Z_\mathcal{A}^{\hat\mu}(T)$ in terms of the Milnor fibers of related hyperplane arrangements. This formula shows that, in a precise sense, the degree to which $Z_{\mathcal{A}}^{\hat\mu}(T)$ fails to be a combinatorial invariant is completely controlled by these Milnor fibers. As one application, we use this formula to show that the map taking each complex arrangement $\mathcal{A}$ to the Hodge–Deligne specialization of $Z_{\mathcal{A}}^{\hat\mu}(T)$ is locally constant on the realization space of any loop-free matroid. We also prove a combinatorial formula expressing the motivic Igusa zeta function of $\mathcal{A}$ in terms of the characteristic polynomials of related arrangements.

The algebraic K-theory of Lawvere theories is a conceptual device to elucidate the stable homology of the symmetry groups of algebraic structures such as the permutation groups and the automorphism groups of free groups. In this paper, we fully address the question of how Morita equivalence classes of Lawvere theories interact with algebraic K-theory. On the one hand, we show that the higher algebraic K-theory is invariant under passage to matrix theories. On the other hand, we show that the higher algebraic K-theory is not fully Morita invariant because of the behavior of idempotents in non-additive contexts: We compute the K-theory of all Lawvere theories Morita equivalent to the theory of Boolean algebras.

We address Hodge integrals over the hyperelliptic locus. Recently Afandi computed, via localisation techniques, such one-descendant integrals and showed that they are Stirling numbers. We give another proof of the same statement by a very short argument, exploiting Chern classes of spin structures and relations arising from Topological Recursion in the sense of Eynard and Orantin.

These techniques seem also suitable to deal with three orthogonal generalisations: (1) the extension to the r-hyperelliptic locus; (2) the extension to an arbitrary number of non-Weierstrass pairs of points; (3) the extension to multiple descendants.

A subset Y of the general linear group $\text{GL}(n,q)$ is called t-intersecting if $\text{rk}(x-y)\le n-t$ for all $x,y\in Y$ , or equivalently x and y agree pointwise on a t-dimensional subspace of $\mathbb{F}_q^n$ for all $x,y\in Y$ . We show that, if n is sufficiently large compared to t, the size of every such t-intersecting set is at most that of the stabiliser of a basis of a t-dimensional subspace of $\mathbb{F}_q^n$ . In case of equality, the characteristic vector of Y is a linear combination of the characteristic vectors of the cosets of these stabilisers. We also give similar results for subsets of $\text{GL}(n,q)$ that intersect not necessarily pointwise in t-dimensional subspaces of $\mathbb{F}_q^n$ and for cross-intersecting subsets of $\text{GL}(n,q)$ . These results may be viewed as variants of the classical Erdős–Ko–Rado Theorem in extremal set theory and are q-analogs of corresponding results known for the symmetric group. Our methods are based on eigenvalue techniques to estimate the size of the largest independent sets in graphs and crucially involve the representation theory of $\text{GL}(n,q)$ .

A Richardson variety in a flag variety is an intersection of two Schubert varieties defined by transverse flags. We define and study relative Richardson varieties, which are defined over a base scheme with a vector bundle and two flags. To do so, we generalise transversality of flags to a relative notion, versality, that allows the flags to be non-transverse over some fibers. Relative Richardson varieties share many of the geometric properties of Richardson varieties. We generalise several geometric and cohomological facts about Richardson varieties to relative Richardson varieties. We also prove that the local geometry of a relative Richardson variety is governed, in a precise sense, by the two intersecting Schubert varieties, giving a generalisation, in the flag variety case, of a theorem of Knutson–Woo–Yong; we also generalise this result to intersections of arbitrarily many relative Schubert varieties. We give an application to Brill–Noether varieties on elliptic curves, and a conjectural generalisation to higher genus curves.

The equivariant Heegaard genus of a 3-manifold W with the action of a finite group G of diffeomorphisms is the smallest genus of an equivariant Heegaard splitting for W. Although a Heegaard splitting of a reducible manifold is reducible and although if W is reducible, there is an equivariant essential sphere, we show that equivariant Heegaard genus may be super-additive, additive, or sub-additive under equivariant connected sum. Using a thin position theory for 3-dimensional orbifolds, we establish sharp bounds on the equivariant Heegaard genus of reducible manifolds, similar to those known for tunnel number. Along the way, we make use of a new invariant for W which is much better behaved under equivariant sums.

Hilbert–Kunz multiplicity and F-signature are numerical invariants of commutative rings in positive characteristic that measure severity of singularities: for a regular ring both invariants are equal to one and the converse holds under mild assumptions. A natural question is for what singular rings these invariants are closest to one. For Hilbert–Kunz multiplicity this question was first considered by the last two authors and attracted significant attention. In this paper, we study this question, i.e., an upper bound, for F-signature and revisit lower bounds on Hilbert–Kunz multiplicity.

We show, from a topological viewpoint, that most numbers are not normal in a strong sense. More precisely, the set of numbers $x \in (0,1]$ with the following property is comeager: for all integers $b\ge 2$ and $k\ge 1$ , the sequence of vectors made by the frequencies of all possibile strings of length k in the b-adic representation of x has a maximal subset of accumulation points, and each of them is the limit of a subsequence with an index set of nonzero asymptotic density. This extends and provides a streamlined proof of the main result given by Olsen (2004) in this Journal. We provide analogues in the context of analytic P-ideals and regular matrices.

We show that any set of distinct homotopy classes of simple closed curves on the torus that pairwise intersect at most k times has size $k+O(\sqrt k \log k)$ . Prior to this work, a lemma of Agol, together with the state of the art bounds for the size of prime gaps, implied the error term $O(k^{21/40})$ , and in fact the assumption of the Riemann hypothesis improved this error term to the one we obtain $O(\sqrt k\log k)$ . By contrast, our methods are elementary, combinatorial, and geometric.

The set of points that escape to infinity under iteration of a cosine map, that is, of the form $C_{a,\,b} \colon z \mapsto ae^z+be^{-z}$ for $a,\,b\in \mathbb{C}^\ast$ , consists of a collection of injective curves, called dynamic rays. If a critical value of $C_{a,\,b}$ escapes to infinity, then some of its dynamic rays overlap pairwise and split at critical points. We consider a large subclass of cosine maps with escaping critical values, including the map $z\mapsto \cosh(z)$ . We provide an explicit topological model for their dynamics on their Julia sets. We do so by first providing a model for the dynamics near infinity of any cosine map, and then modifying it to reflect the splitting of rays for functions of the subclass we study. As an application, we give an explicit combinatorial description of the overlap occurring between the dynamic rays of $z\mapsto \cosh(z)$ , and conclude that no two of its dynamic rays land together.

We consider an analogue of Kontsevich’s matrix Airy function where the cubic potential $\textrm{Tr}(\Phi^3)$ is replaced by a quartic term $\textrm{Tr}\!\left(\Phi^4\right)$ . Cumulants of the resulting measure are known to decompose into cycle types for which a recursive system of equations can be established. We develop a new, purely algebraic geometrical solution strategy for the two initial equations of the recursion, based on properties of Cauchy matrices. These structures led in subsequent work to the discovery that the quartic analogue of the Kontsevich model obeys blobbed topological recursion.

We show that the geometric realisation of the poset of proper parabolic subgroups of a large-type Artin group has a systolic geometry. We use this geometry to show that the set of parabolic subgroups of a large-type Artin group is stable under arbitrary intersections and forms a lattice for the inclusion. As an application, we show that parabolic subgroups of large-type Artin groups are stable under taking roots and we completely characterise the parabolic subgroups that are conjugacy stable.

We also use this geometric perspective to recover and unify results describing the normalisers of parabolic subgroups of large-type Artin groups.

For G a profinite group, we construct an equivalence between rational G-Mackey functors and a certain full subcategory of G-sheaves over the space of closed subgroups of G called Weyl-G-sheaves. This subcategory consists of those sheaves whose stalk over a subgroup K is K-fixed.

This extends the classification of rational G-Mackey functors for finite G of Thévenaz and Webb, and Greenlees and May to a new class of examples. Moreover, this equivalence is instrumental in the classification of rational G-spectra for profinite G, as given in the second author’s thesis.

We investigate which higher rank simple Lie groups admit profinitely but not abstractly commensurable lattices. We show that no such examples exist for the complex forms of type $E_8$ , $F_4$ , and $G_2$ . In contrast, there are arbitrarily many such examples in all other higher rank Lie groups, except possibly $\textrm{SL}_{2n+1}(\mathbb{R})$ , $\textrm{SL}_{2n+1}(\mathbb{C})$ , $\textrm{SL}_n(\mathbb{H})$ , or groups of type $E_6$ .

We prove that analogues of the Hardy–Littlewood generalised twin prime conjecture for almost primes hold on average. Our main theorem establishes an asymptotic formula for the number of integers $n=p_1p_2 \leq X$ such that $n+h$ is a product of exactly two primes which holds for almost all $|h|\leq H$ with $\log^{19+\varepsilon}X\leq H\leq X^{1-\varepsilon}$ , under a restriction on the size of one of the prime factors of n and $n+h$ . Additionally, we consider correlations $n,n+h$ where n is a prime and $n+h$ has exactly two prime factors, establishing an asymptotic formula which holds for almost all $|h| \leq H$ with $X^{1/6+\varepsilon}\leq H\leq X^{1-\varepsilon}$ .

We compute, via motivic wall-crossing, the generating function of virtual motives of the Quot scheme of points on ${\mathbb{A}}^3$ , generalising to higher rank a result of Behrend–Bryan–Szendrői. We show that this motivic partition function converges to a Gaussian distribution, extending a result of Morrison.

In 1974, Erdős posed the following problem. Given an oriented graph H, determine or estimate the maximum possible number of H-free orientations of an n-vertex graph. When H is a tournament, the answer was determined precisely for sufficiently large n by Alon and Yuster. In general, when the underlying undirected graph of H contains a cycle, one can obtain accurate bounds by combining an observation of Kozma and Moran with celebrated results on the number of F-free graphs. As the main contribution of the paper, we resolve all remaining cases in an asymptotic sense, thereby giving a rather complete answer to Erdős’s question. Moreover, we determine the answer exactly when H is an odd cycle and n is sufficiently large, answering a question of Araújo, Botler and Mota.

We give a new approach to characterising and computing the set of global maximisers and minimisers of the functions in the Takagi class and, in particular, of the Takagi–Landsberg functions. The latter form a family of fractal functions $f_\alpha:[0,1]\to{\mathbb R}$ parameterised by $\alpha\in(-2,2)$ . We show that $f_\alpha$ has a unique maximiser in $[0,1/2]$ if and only if there does not exist a Littlewood polynomial that has $\alpha$ as a certain type of root, called step root. Our general results lead to explicit and closed-form expressions for the maxima of the Takagi–Landsberg functions with $\alpha\in(-2,1/2]\cup(1,2)$ . For $(1/2,1]$ , we show that the step roots are dense in that interval. If $\alpha\in (1/2,1]$ is a step root, then the set of maximisers of $f_\alpha$ is an explicitly given perfect set with Hausdorff dimension $1/(n+1)$ , where n is the degree of the minimal Littlewood polynomial that has $\alpha$ as its step root. In the same way, we determine explicitly the minima of all Takagi–Landsberg functions. As a corollary, we show that the closure of the set of all real roots of all Littlewood polynomials is equal to $[-2,-1/2]\cup[1/2,2]$ .

We consider the three-dimensional sloshing problem on a triangular prism whose angles with the sloshing surface are of the form ${\pi}/{2q}$ , where q is an integer. We are interested in finding a two-term asymptotic expansion of the eigenvalue counting function. When both angles are ${\pi}/{4}$ , we compute the exact value of the second term. As for the general case, we conjecture an asymptotic expansion by constructing quasimodes for the problem and computing the counting function of the related quasi-eigenvalues. These quasimodes come from solutions of the sloping beach problem and correspond to two kinds of waves, edge waves and surface waves. We show that the quasi-eigenvalues are exponentially close to real eigenvalues of the sloshing problem. The asymptotic expansion of their counting function is closely related to a lattice counting problem inside a perturbed ellipse where the perturbation is in a sense random. The contribution of the angles can then be detected through that perturbation.

We interpret the degrees which arise in Tevelev’s study of scattering amplitudes in terms of moduli spaces of Hurwitz covers. Via excess intersection theory, the boundary geometry of the Hurwitz moduli space yields a simple recursion for the Tevelev degrees (together with their natural two parameter generalisation). We find exact solutions which specialise to Tevelev’s formula in his cases and connect to the projective geometry of lines and Castelnuovo’s classical count of $g^1_d$ ’s in other cases. For almost all values, the calculation of the two parameter generalisation of the Tevelev degree is new. A related count of refined Dyck paths is solved along the way.