## Hyperbolic Surfaces

Ok, with the hyperbolic plane and its metric and geodesics out of the way, we can start getting into some surface theory.

## The hyperbolic plane

So, I know I usually talk about strictly algebraic geometry stuff, but the moduli of curves lives in an interesting place.  It’s both an algebraic and an analytic object.  So we’re going to start by talking a bit about hyperbolic surfaces, as we work towards a construction of Teichmüller space, which is used to construct the moduli of curves over $\mathbb{C}$.

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## New Series: Moduli of Riemann Surfaces

Though I’m not quite ready to start (next week!) I feel that, in the spirit of Jim getting back to the blogging and my continued promises, I’d announce my series now.  I’m going to start a detailed series on the moduli of Riemann surfaces, including both topological and geometric aspects.  And I figured I’d start it out with a list of references for some of the topics that I’d be covering:

## The torsion on CM elliptic curves over prime degree number fields

It’s good to be back! This weekend I’m going to Paris to give a talk in the London-Paris Number Theory seminar so I’m going to give a preview of that talk, based on joint work with Pete Clark and Abbey Bourdon. We will post this onto the arxiv soon.

## I know I’ve said it before, but…

Rigorous Trivialities will be returning! Not immediately, but it will be.  I’m reorganizing a bit, and as I’m going to be contributing to a blog for the general public via the Kavli Foundation, I’m also going to try to revive this blog.  Oh, and I’m on twitter now as @SiegelMath, and we’ll see if I’m capable of microblogging.  Lots of experiments in communicating math for me over the next year, we’ll see how it goes, hope that some people are still out there and watching, but even if not, I’ll do my best to draw people back.

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## The sound you hear is another conjecture in birational geometry dropping like a fly

These are interesting times to look over the algebraic geometry arxiv postings. Just over a week ago, there was a posting by Tanaka which claimed the minimal model program was false in characteristic two. Then yesterday at the top of the page was a paper by Castravet and Tevelev claiming that the Mori Dream Space conjecture for $\overline{M_{0,n}}$ was false. Then today, there is a paper by Fontanari claiming instead that the Mori Dream Space conjecture is TRUE for the same space, but modded out by the finite group $S_n$.