We study various geometrical quantities for CalabiYau varieties realized as cones over Gorenstein Fano varieties, obtained as toric varieties from reflexive polytopes in various dimensions. Focus is made on reflexive polytopes up to dimension 4 and the minimized volumes of the SasakiEinstein base of the corresponding CalabiYau cone are calculated. By doing so, we conjecture new bounds for the SasakiEinstein volume with respect to various topological quantities of the corresponding toric varieties. We give interpretations about these volume bounds in the context of associated field theories via the AdS/CFT correspondence.

Let V be a convex vector bundle over a smooth projective manifold X, and let Y be the subset of X which is the zero locus of a regular section of V. This mostly expository paper discusses a conjecture which relates the virtual fundamental classes of X and Y. Using an argument due to Gathmann, we prove a special case of the conjecture. The paper concludes with a discussion of how our conjecture relates to the mirror theorems in the literature.

Let the vector bundle E be a deformation of the tangent bundle over the Grassmannian G(k, n). We compute the ring structure of sheaf cohomology valued in exterior powers of E, also known as the polymology. This is the first part of a project studying the quantum sheaf cohomology of Grassmannians with deformations of the tangent bundle, a generalization of ordinary quantum cohomology rings of Grassmannians. A companion physics paper [6] describes physical aspects of the theory, including a conjecture for the quantum sheaf cohomology ring, and numerous examples.

In this paper, we describe all (2,3)-torus structures of a highly symmetric 39-cuspidal degree 12 curve. A direct computer-aided determination of these torus structures seems to be out of reach. We use various quotients by automorphisms to find torus structures. We use a height pairing argument to show that there are no further structures.

In this paper, we study effective recursion formulae for computing intersection numbers of mixed \psi and \psi classes on moduli spaces of curves. By using the celebrated WittenKontsevich theorem, we generalize MulaseSafnuk form of Mirzakhani's recursion and prove a recursion formula of higher WeilPetersson volumes. We also present recursion formulae to compute intersection pairings in the tautological rings of moduli spaces of curves.