From SICs and MUBs to Eddington

This is a survey of some very old knowledge about Mutually Unbiased Bases (MUB) and Symmetric Informationally Complete POVMs (SIC). In prime dimensions the former are closely tied to an elliptic normal curve symmetric under the Heisenberg group, while the latter are believed to be orbits under the Heisenberg group in all dimensions. In dimensions 3 and 4 the SICs are understandable in terms of elliptic curves, but a general statement escapes us. The geometry of the SICs in 3 and 4 dimensions is discussed in some detail.Comment: 12 pages; from the Festschrift for Tony Sudber

The modularity of the Barth-Nieto quintic and its relatives

The moduli space of (1,3)-polarized abelian surfaces with full level-2 structure is birational to a double cover of the Barth-Nieto quintic. Barth and Nieto have shown that these varieties have Calabi-Yau models Z and Y, respectively. In this paper we apply the Weil conjectures to show that Y and Z are rigid and we prove that the L-function of their common third \'etale cohomology group is modular, as predicted by a conjecture of Fontaine and Mazur. The corresponding modular form is the unique normalized cusp form of weight 4 for the group \Gamma_1(6). By Tate's conjecture, this should imply that Y, the fibred square of the universal elliptic curve S_1(6), and Verrill's rigid Calabi-Yau Z_{A_3}, which all have the same L-function, are in correspondence over Q. We show that this is indeed the case by giving explicit maps.Comment: 30 pages, Latex2

Projective varieties with many degenerate subvarieties

We study the problem of classifying the irreducible projective varieties $X$ of dimension $n\ge 2$ in $\Bbb P^N$ which contain an algebraic family \Cal F of dimension $h+1$ ($h<n$) of subvarieties $Y$ of dimension $n-h$, each one contained in a $\Bbb P^{N-h-1}$. We prove that one of the following happens: (i) there exists an integer $r$, $r<N-n$ such that $X$ is contained in a variety $V_r$ of dimension at most $N-r$ containing a family of dimension $h+1$ of subvarieties of dimension $N-h-r$, each one contained in a linear space of dimension $N-h-1$; (ii) The degree of $Y$ is bounded by a function of $h$ and $N-n$ (in this case $X$ is called of isolated type). Successively we study some special cases; in particular we give a complete classification of surfaces in $\Bbb P^5$ containing a family of dimension $2$ of curves of $\Bbb P^3$.Comment: 19 pages, AMS-TeX 2.

Tropicalization of classical moduli spaces

The image of the complement of a hyperplane arrangement under a monomial map can be tropicalized combinatorially using matroid theory. We apply this to classical moduli spaces that are associated with complex reflection arrangements. Starting from modular curves, we visit the Segre cubic, the Igusa quartic, and moduli of marked del Pezzo surfaces of degrees 2 and 3. Our primary example is the Burkhardt quartic, whose tropicalization is a 3-dimensional fan in 39-dimensional space. This effectuates a synthesis of concrete and abstract approaches to tropical moduli of genus 2 curves.Comment: 33 page

On complex and real identifiability of tensors

We report about the state of the art on complex and real generic identifiability of tensors, we describe some of our recent results obtained in [6] and we present perspectives on the subject.Comment: To appear on Rivista di Matematica dell'Universit\`a di Parma, Volume 8, Number 2, 2017, pages 367-37

Hurwitz numbers and intersections on moduli spaces of curves

This article is an extended version of preprint math.AG/9902104. We find an explicit formula for the number of topologically different ramified coverings of a sphere by a genus g surface with only one complicated branching point in terms of Hodge integrals over the moduli space of genus g curves with marked points.Comment: 30 pages (AMSTeX). Minor typos are correcte