Uniformity of stably integral points on elliptic curves

A common practice in arithmetic geometry is that of generalizing rational points on projective varieties to integral points on quasi-projective varieties. Following this practice, we demonstrate an analogue of a result of L. Caporaso, J. Harris and B. Mazur, showing that the Lang - Vojta conjecture implies a uniform bound on the number of stably integral points on an elliptic curve over a number field, as well as the uniform boundedness conjecture (Merel's theorem).Comment: 10 pages. Postscript file available at http://math.bu.edu/INDIVIDUAL/abrmovic/integral.ps, AMSLaTe

Moduli of algebraic and tropical curves

This is mostly* a non-technical exposition of the joint work arXiv:1212.0373 with Caporaso and Payne. Topics include: Moduli of Riemann surfaces / algebraic curves; Deligne-Mumford compactification; Dual graphs and the combinatorics of the compactification; Tropical curves and their moduli; Non-archimedean geometry and comparison. * Maybe the last section is technical.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures. This text accompanies the author's De Giorgi Colloquium Lecture at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, May 22, 201

Model selection and minimax estimation in generalized linear models

We consider model selection in generalized linear models (GLM) for high-dimensional data and propose a wide class of model selection criteria based on penalized maximum likelihood with a complexity penalty on the model size. We derive a general nonasymptotic upper bound for the expected Kullback-Leibler divergence between the true distribution of the data and that generated by a selected model, and establish the corresponding minimax lower bounds for sparse GLM. For the properly chosen (nonlinear) penalty, the resulting penalized maximum likelihood estimator is shown to be asymptotically minimax and adaptive to the unknown sparsity. We discuss also possible extensions of the proposed approach to model selection in GLM under additional structural constraints and aggregation