Moduli of Curves and Abelian Varieties

The Dutch Intercity Seminar on Moduli, which dates back to the early eighties, was an initiative of G. van der Geer, F. Oort and C. Peters. Through the years it became a focal point of Dutch mathematics and it gained some fame, also outside Holland, as an active biweekly research seminar. The tradition continues up to today. The present volume, with contributions of R. Dijkgraaf, C. Faber, G. van der Geer, R. Hain, E. Looijenga, and F. Oort, originates from the seminar held in 1995--96. Some of the articles here were discussed, in preliminary form, in the seminar; others are completely new. Two introductory papers, on moduli of abelian varieties and on moduli of curves, accompany the articles. Topics include a stratification of a moduli space of abelian varieties in positive characteristic, and the calculation of the classes of the strata, tautological classes for moduli of abelian varieties as well as for moduli of curves, correspondences between moduli spaces of curves, locally symmetric families of curves and jacobians, and the role of symmetric product spaces in quantum field theory, string theory and matrix theory.