Stationary Descendents and the Discriminant Modular Form

Abstract: By using the Gromov-Witten/Hurwitz correspondence, Okounkov and Pandharipande showed that certain generating functions of stationary descendent Gromov-Witten invariants of a smooth elliptic curve are quasimodular forms. In this talk, I will discuss the various ways one can express the discriminant modular form in terms of these generating functions. The motivation behind this calculation is to provide a new perspective on tackling a longstanding conjecture of Lehmer from the middle of the 20th century; Lehmer posited that the Ramanujan tau function (i.e. the Fourier coefficients of the discriminant modular form) never vanishes. The connection with Gromov-Witten invariants allows one to translate Lehmer's conjecture into a combinatorial problem involving characters of the symmetric group and shifted symmetric functions.

algebraic geometrycombinatorics

Audience: researchers in the topic

Tropical Geometry in Frankfurt/Zoom TGiF/Z

Series comments: Description: An afternoon seminar series on tropical geometry, known as the TGiZ ("Tropical Geometry in Zoom") or the TGiF ("Tropical Geometry in Frankfurt") seminar.

Please send an email to one of the organizers at the latest one day before a session if you wish to receive the Zoom link and password.

Videos of some past talks are available on YouTube here, while some slides can be found here.