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NOTES ON VANISHING CYCLES AND APPLICATIONS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2020

LAURENŢIU G. MAXIM*
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 480 Lincoln Drive, MadisonWI53706, USA

Abstract

Vanishing cycles, introduced over half a century ago, are a fundamental tool for studying the topology of complex hypersurface singularity germs, as well as the change in topology of a degenerating family of projective manifolds. More recently, vanishing cycles have found deep applications in enumerative geometry, representation theory, applied algebraic geometry, birational geometry, etc. In this survey, we introduce vanishing cycles from a topological perspective and discuss some of their applications.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2020 Australian Mathematical Publishing Association Inc.

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Footnotes

Communicated by Finnur Larusson

The author was supported by the Simons Foundation Collaboration Grant #567077 and by the Sydney Mathematical Research Institute.

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