
Title: Donghai Pan's extension of the correspondence between hyperelliptic curves and pencils of quadrics
Speaker: Ravi Vakil (Stanford University)
Abstract: There is rich correspondence between hyperelliptic cuves and pencils of quadric hypersurfaces, starting in Miles Reid's Ph.D. thesis. The corresponce relates moduli spaces, Hodge structures, and more. The results have always seemed to me to be very special to this situation, but recently Donghai Pan has extended this to a more general correspondnece, between cyclic covers and pencils of Fermat hypersurfaces. In this talk I will describe some of his work.