We will present some of the original definitions, results, and proof techniques about Pfaffian functions on the reals by Khovanskii.
A simple example of a Pfaffian function is an analytic function $f$ in one variable $x$ satisfying a differential equation $f^\prime = P(x,f)$ where $P$ is a polynomial in two variables. Khovanskii gives a notion of complexity of Pfaffian functions which in the example is just the degree of $P$. Using this complexity, he proves analogues of Bézout's theorem for Pfaffian curves (say, zero loci of Pfaffian functions in two variables), with explicit upper bounds in terms of the ocurring complexities.
We explain a recent application by J. Pila and others to a low-dimensional case of Wilkie's conjecture on rational points of bounded height on restricted Pfaffian curves. The result says that the number of rational points of height bounded by $T$, on a transcendental restricted Pfaffian curve, grows at most as a power of log$(T)$ as $T$ grows. This improves the typical upper bound $T^\epsilon$ in Pila-Wilkie's results in general o-minimal structures, the improvement being due to extra geometric Bézout-like control.
In the non-archimedean setting, I will explain analogues of some of these results and techniques, most of which are (emerging) work in progress with L. Lipshitz, F. Martin and A. Smeets. Some ideas in this case come from work by Denef and Lipshitz on variants of Artin approximation in the context of power series solution.[-]

Let X be a smooth and projective complex algebraic variety. Several notions, describing how close X is to projective space, have been developed: X is rational if an open subset of X is isomorphic to an open of a projective space, X is stably rational if this property holds for a product of X with some projective space, and X is unirational if X is rationally dominated by a projective space. A classical Lüroth problem is to find unirational nonrational varieties. This problem remained open till 1970th, when three types of such examples were produced: cubic threefolds (Clemens and Griffiths), some quartic threefolds (Iskovskikh and Manin), and some conic bundles (Artin et Mumford). The last examples are even not stably rational. The stable rationality of the first two examples was not known.
In a recent work C. Voisin established that a double solid ramified along a very general quartic is not stably rational. Inspired by this work, we showed that many quartic solids are not stably rational (joint work with J.-L. Colliot-Thélène). More generally, B. Totaro showed that a very general hypersurface of degree d is not stably rational if d/2 is at least the smallest integer not smaller than (n+2)/3. The same method allowed us to show that the rationality is not a deformation invariant (joint with B. Hassett and Y. Tschinkel).
In this series of lectures, we will discuss the methods to obtain the results above: the universal properties of the Chow group of zero-cycles, the decomposition of the diagonal, and the specialization arguments.[-]

Let X be a smooth and projective complex algebraic variety. Several notions, describing how close X is to projective space, have been developed: X is rational if an open subset of X is isomorphic to an open of a projective space, X is stably rational if this property holds for a product of X with some projective space, and X is unirational if X is rationally dominated by a projective space. A classical Lüroth problem is to find unirational nonrational varieties. This problem remained open till 1970th, when three types of such examples were produced: cubic threefolds (Clemens and Griffiths), some quartic threefolds (Iskovskikh and Manin), and some conic bundles (Artin et Mumford). The last examples are even not stably rational. The stable rationality of the first two examples was not known.
In a recent work C. Voisin established that a double solid ramified along a very general quartic is not stably rational. Inspired by this work, we showed that many quartic solids are not stably rational (joint work with J.-L. Colliot-Thélène). More generally, B. Totaro showed that a very general hypersurface of degree d is not stably rational if d/2 is at least the smallest integer not smaller than (n+2)/3. The same method allowed us to show that the rationality is not a deformation invariant (joint with B. Hassett and Y. Tschinkel).
In this series of lectures, we will discuss the methods to obtain the results above: the universal properties of the Chow group of zero-cycles, the decomposition of the diagonal, and the specialization arguments.[-]

Let $X$ be a projective variety over a field $k$. Chow groups are defined as the quotient of a free group generated by irreducible subvarieties (of fixed dimension) by some equivalence relation (called rational equivalence). These groups carry many information on $X$ but are in general very difficult to study. On the other hand, one can associate to $X$ several cohomology groups which are "linear" objects and hence are rather simple to understand. One then construct maps called "cycle class maps" from Chow groups to several cohomological theories.
In this talk, we focus on the case of a variety $X$ over a finite field. In this case, Tate conjecture claims the surjectivity of the cycle class map with rational coefficients; this conjecture is still widely open. In case of integral coefficients, we speak about the integral version of the conjecture and we know several counterexamples for the surjectivity. In this talk, we present a survey of some well-known results on this subject and discuss other properties of algebraic cycles which are either proved or expected to be true. We also discuss several involved methods.[-]