Abstract

I will describe a classical problem going back to 1848 (Steiner, Cayley, Salmon,...) and a solution using simple techniques, but techniques that one would never really have thought of without ideas coming from string theory (Gromov-Witten invariants, BPS states) and modern geometry (the Maulik-Nekrasov-Okounkov-Pandharipande conjecture). In generic families of curves C on a complex surface S, nodal curves—those with the simplest possible singularities—appear in codimension 1. More generally those with d nodes occur in codimension d. In particular a d-dimensional linear family of curves should contain a finite number of such d-nodal curves. The classical problem—at least in the case of S being the projective plane—is to determine this number. The Gttsche conjecture states that the answer should be topological, given by a universal degree d polynomial in the four numbers C.C, c_1(S).C, c_1(S)^2 and c_2(S). There are now proofs in various settings; a completely algebraic proof was found recently by Tzeng. I will explain a simpler approach which is joint work with Martijn Kool and Vivek Shende.