Hannah Larson, UC Berkeley

Title: Moduli spaces of curves with polynomial point count

Abstract: How many isomorphism classes of genus g curves are there over a finite field F_q? In joint work with Samir Canning, Sam Payne, and Thomas Willwacher, we prove that the answer is a polynomial in q if and only if g is at most 8. One of the key ingredients is our recent progress on understanding low-degree odd cohomology of moduli spaces of stable curves with marked points.