It was observed in the 1980's that the entropy of an action by two or more commuting automorphisms on a compact abelian group is sometimes given by a zeta- or L-value. For example zeta(3) arises in this way. In the talk I will report on joint work with Thu Hà Trieu, which at least for expansive actions explains the deeper reason for these observations by a combination of operator algebra theory, in particular the theory of their determinants, K-theory and cyclic and Deligne cohomology. The talk is addressed to a general audience and will not go into technical details. Instead we will sketch the relevant theories and explain how to fit them together for our purpose.

The subject of counting curves on 3-folds is extremely rich. Modern tools allow us to define several sophisticated invariants that we think of as "curve counts", such as Gromov-Witten, Donaldson-Thomas, Pandharipande-Thomas and Gopakumar-Vafa invariants. They are proven or expected to be equivalent to each other, in a precise sense. In this talk, I will give an idea of how these invariants are defined and what is known about them, focusing on these correspondences and rationality properties. Along the way, I'll explain a result of myself with Ivan Karpov concerning the rationality of PT generating series on Fano 3-folds; other than that, the talk will be mostly expository.

We show that, under a division condition, the tangential Cauchy-Riemann cohomology of a compact Lie group with a left-invariant CR structure can be computed on a suitable maximal torus. As a consequence, we conclude that the tangential Cauchy-Riemann cohomology is finite-dimensional. We also show that, for a class of CR structures, this division condition is necessary for the total cohomology to be finite-dimensional. The proof combines Fourier analysis on compact Lie groups, highest-weight representations and Lie algebra cohomology. This not only generalizes but provides completely new proofs for the analogous result due to Pittie and for its extensions to Levi-flat CR structures, obtained by Jacobowitz and Jahnke.

A compact symplectic manifold $(M, \omega)$ is called positive monotone if its first Chern class is a positive multiple of $[\omega]$ in the second de Rham group $H^2(M)$. A smooth Fano variety is a complex manifold, whose anti-canonical line bundle is ample. Such a variety can be endowed with a symplectic form such that it becomes a positive monotone symplectic manifold. For this reason, positive monotone symplectic manifolds are considered the symplectic counterparts of smooth Fano varieties.

In the field of symplectic geometry, a general outstanding issue is understanding in what context positive monotone symplectic manifolds differ from Fano varieties. In low dimensions, namely two and four, it has been proven by Gromov, Taubes, McDuff, and Ohat-Ono that any positive monotone symplectic manifold is symplectomorphic to a Fano variety. Starting from dimension twelve, work by Fine and Panov provides examples of positive monotone symplectic manifolds that are not even homotopy equivalent to a Fano variety.

In this talk, I will explain what is known about the differences between Fano varieties and positive monotone symplectic manifolds endowed with a Hamiltonian action of a compact torus $T$. In particular, I will present new results for the case where the complexity of the action is one, i.e., $\frac{1}{2}\dim(M)-\dim(T)=1$.

This talk is based on joint work with Liat Kessler, Silvia Sabatini, and Daniele Sepe.

Since the groundbreaking work of M. Gromov in the 1980s many tools have been developed for distinguishing open symplectic domains. However, until recently, similar questions in the contact geometric setup were largely open. For instance, it was not known whether there are open domains in the standard contact vector space of dimension $>3$ which are diffeomorphic but not contactomorphic to it (in dimension $3$ it is known that all of them are). In my lecture I will discuss Floer theoretic tools for answering this type of questions. As one application I will construct a continuous family of pairwise non-contactomorphic open balls in the standard contact ${\mathbb R}^5$. The lecture is based on a joint work in progress with K. Ajij, Mahan Mj, Dishant Pancholi and L. Polterovich.