The tropicalization of the moduli space of curves

We show that the skeleton of the Deligne-Mumford-Knudsen moduli stack of stable curves is naturally identified with the moduli space of extended tropical curves, and that this is compatible with the "naive" set-theoretic tropicalization map. The proof passes through general structure results on the skeleton of a toroidal Deligne-Mumford stack. Furthermore, we construct tautological forgetful, clutching, and gluing maps between moduli spaces of extended tropical curves and show that they are compatible with the analogous tautological maps in the algebraic setting.Comment: v2: 55 pages. Expanded Section 2 with improved treatment of the category of generalized cone complexes. Clarified the role of the coarse moduli space and its analytification in the construction of the skeleton for a toroidal DM stac

Iterated spans and classical topological field theories

We construct higher categories of iterated spans, possibly equipped with extra structure in the form of "local systems", and classify their fully dualizable objects. By the Cobordism Hypothesis, these give rise to framed topological quantum field theories, which are the framed versions of the "classical" TQFTs considered in the quantization programme of Freed-Hopkins-Lurie-Teleman. Using this machinery, we also construct an infinity-category of Lagrangian correspondences between symplectic derived algebraic stacks and show that all its objects are fully dualizable.Comment: Accepted version, plus corrections to Remarks 10.5 and 10.7. 64 page

A categorical approach to the maximum theorem

Berge's maximum theorem gives conditions ensuring the continuity of an optimised function as a parameter changes. In this paper we state and prove the maximum theorem in terms of the theory of monoidal topology and the theory of double categories. This approach allows us to generalise (the main assertion of) the maximum theorem, which is classically stated for topological spaces, to pseudotopological spaces and pretopological spaces, as well as to closure spaces, approach spaces and probabilistic approach spaces, amongst others. As a part of this we prove a generalisation of the extreme value theorem.Comment: 45 pages. Minor changes in v2: this is the final preprint for publication in JPA