This volume contains the written account of the Bonn seminar on arith-metic geometry 2003/2004. It gives a coherent exposition of the theory of intersections of modular correspondences. The focus of the seminar is the formula for the intersection number of arithmetic modular correspondences due to Gross and Keating. Other topics treated are Hurwitz's theorem on the intersection of modular correspondences over the field of complex numbers, and the relation of the arithmetic intersection numbers to Fourier coefficients of Siegel-Eisenstein series. Also included is background material on one-dimensional formal groups and their endomorphisms, and on quadratic forms over the ring of p-adic integers.

In this note we show that if a projective manifold admits a Khler metric with negative holomorphic sectional curvature then the canonical bundle of the manifold is ample. This confirms a conjecture of the second author.

Every smooth cubic plane curve has 9 flex points and 27 sextatic points. We study the following question asked by Farb: Is it true that the known algebraic structures give all the possible ways to continuously choose n distinct points on every smooth cubic plane curve, for each given positive integer n? We give an affirmative answer to the question when n=9 and 18 (the smallest open cases), and a negative answer for infinitely many n's.

We study large groups of birational transformations Bir(X), where X is a variety of dimension at least 3, defined over C or a subfield of C. Two prominent cases are when X is the projective space P^n, in which case Bir(X) is the Cremona group of rank n, or when X⊂P^{n+1} is a smooth cubic hypersurface. In both cases, and more generally when X is birational to a conic bundle, we produce infinitely many distinct group homomorphisms from Bir(X) to Z/2, showing in particular that the group Bir(X) is not perfect, and thus not simple. As a consequence, we also obtain that the Cremona group of rank n⩾3 is not generated by linear and Jonquières elements.

This work is devoted to the study of the foundations of quantum K-theory, a K-theoretic version of quantum cohomology theory. In particular, it gives a deformation of the ordinary K-ring K(X) of a smooth projective variety X, analogous to the relation between quantum cohomology and ordinary cohomology. This new quantum product also gives a new class of Frobenius manifolds.