We discuss the Kodaira problem for uniruled Kähler spaces. Building on a construction due to Voisin, we give an example of a uniruled Kähler space X such that every run of the K_X-MMP immediately terminates with a Mori fibre space, yet X does not admit an algebraic approximation. Our example also shows that for a Mori fibration, approximability of the base does not imply approximability of the total space.

We study Thurston’s Lipschitz and curve metrics, as well as the arc metric on the Teichmüller space of one-hold tori equipped with complete hyperbolic metrics with boundary holonomy of fixed length. We construct natural Lipschitz maps between two surfaces equipped with such hyperbolic metrics that generalize Thurston’s stretch maps and prove the following: (1) On the Teichmüller space of the torus with one boundary component, the Lipschitz and the curve metrics coincide and define a geodesic metric on this space. (2) On the same space, the arc and the curve metrics coincide when the length of the boundary component is ≤4arcsinh(1), but differ when the boundary length is large. We further apply our stretch map generalization to construct novel Thurston geodesics on the Teichmüller spaces of closed hyperbolic surfaces, and use these geodesics to show that the sum-symmetrization of the Thurston metric fails to exhibit Gromov hyperbolicity.

This project was sponsored through the Schiff Fellowship program of Brandeis University. This project involved using the power series method to construct a third order nonlinear ordinary differential equation, a Schwarzian equation, for each of the "genus zero" modular functions, described in the Conway-Norton paper. We first use the Borcherd recursion formuli to generate, in each case, a modular function up to whatever degree we desire, and then use the fact that there is a Schwarzian equation, determined by a single rational function we call a Q-value. By similar power series methods, we compute the coefficients of our rational function, and hence have all the necessary data to create a Schwarzian differential equation for each modular function. This equation can, in turn, be used to recover the modular function itself.

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We calculate the small quantum orbifold cohomology of arbitrary weighted projective spaces. We generalize Givental’s heuristic argument, which relates small quantum cohomology to$S$^{1}-equivariant Floer cohomology of loop space, to weighted projective spaces and use this to conjecture an explicit formula for the small$J$-function, a generating function for certain genus-zero Gromov–Witten invariants. We prove this conjecture using a method due to Bertram. This provides the first non-trivial example of a family of orbifolds of arbitrary dimension for which the small quantum orbifold cohomology is known. In addition we obtain formulas for the small$J$-functions of weighted projective complete intersections satisfying a combinatorial condition; this condition naturally singles out the class of orbifolds with terminal singularities.