Nagata type statements

Nagata solved Hilbert's 14-th problem in 1958 in the negative. The solution naturally lead him to a tantalizing conjecture that remains widely open after more than half a century of intense efforts. Using Nagata's theorem as starting point, and the conjecture, with its multiple variations, as motivation, we explore the important questions of finite generation for invariant rings, for support semigroups of multigraded algebras, and for Mori cones of divisors on blown up surfaces, and the rationality of Waldschimdt constants. Finally we suggest a connection between the Mori cone of the Zariski-Riemann space and the continuity of the Waldschmidt constant as a function on the space of valuations.Comment: 45 pages. These notes correspond to the course of the same title given by the first author in the workshop "Asymptotic invariants attached to linear series" held in the Pedagogical University of Cracow from May 16 to 20, 201

Complex projective surfaces and infinite groups

The paper contains a general construction which produces new examples of non simply-connected smooth projective surfaces. We analyze the resulting surfaces and their fundamental groups. Many of these fundamental groups are expected to be non-residually finite. Using the construction we also suggest a series of potential counterexamples to the Shafarevich conjecture which claims that the universal covering of smooth projective variety is holomorphically convex. The examples are only potential since they depend on group theoretic questions, which we formulate, but we do not know how to answer. At the end we formulate an arithmetic version of the Shafarevich conjecture.Comment: 29 pages, some comments and examples added LaTeX 2.0

Poincar{\'e} series and linking of Legendrian knots

On a negatively curved surface, we show that the Poincar{\'e} series counting geodesic arcs orthogonal to some pair of closed geodesic curves has a meromorphic continuation to the whole complex plane. When both curves are homologically trivial, we prove that the Poincar{\'e} series has an explicit rational value at 0 interpreting it in terms of linking number of Legendrian knots. In particular, for any pair of points on the surface, the lengths of all geodesic arcs connecting the two points determine its genus, and, for any pair of homologically trivial closed geodesics, the lengths of all geodesic arcs orthogonal to both geodesics determine the linking number of the two geodesics.Comment: Minor modifications, 78