Topology Seminar: Kevin Casto

Church-Ellenberg-Farb introduced the theory of FI-modules to explain the phenomenon of representation stability of the cohomology of configuration spaces. I will explain the basics of how this story goes, and then explain how to extend their analysis to two generalized types of configuration spaces. Furthermore, I will explain how the Grothendieck-Lefschetz formula connects these topological stability phenomena to stabilization of statistics for polynomials and rational maps over finite fields.