In my work in progress on complex analytic vanishing cycles for formal schemes, I have defined integral "etale" cohomology groups of a compact strictly analytic space over the field of Laurent power series with complex coefficients. These are finitely generated abelian groups provided with a quasi-unipotent action of the fundamental group of the punctured complex plane, and they give rise to all $l$-adic etale cohomology groups of the space. After a short survey of this work, I will explain a theorem which, in the case when the space is rig-smooth, compares those groups and the de Rham cohomology groups of the space. The latter are provided with the Gauss-Manin connection and an additional structure which allow one to recover from them the "etale" cohomology groups with complex coefficients.[-]

I am going to define toroidal crossing singularities and toroidal crossing varieties and explain how to produce them in large quantities by subdividing lattice polytopes. I will then explain the statement of a global smoothing theorem proved jointly with Felten and Filip. The theorem follows the tradition of well-known theorems by Friedman, Kawamata-Namikawa and Gross-Siebert. In order to apply a variant of the theorem to construct (conjecturally all) projective Fano manifolds with non-empty anticanonical divisor, Corti and Petracci discovered the necessity to allow for particular singular log structures that are known by the inspiring name 'admissible'. I will explain the beautiful classical geometric curve-in-surface geometry that underlies this notion and hint at why we believe that we can feed these singular log structures into the smoothing theorem in order to produce all 98 Fano threefolds with very ample anticanonical class by a single method.[-]

This talk will describe ongoing joint work with Paul Cadman and Duco van Straten, based on the PhD thesis of the former. Givental and Varchenko used the period mapping to pull back the intersection form on the Milnor fibre of an irreducible plane curve singularity $C$, and thereby define a symplectic structure on the base space of a miniversal deformation. We show how to combine this with a symmetric basis for the module of vector fields tangent to the discriminant, to produce involutive ideals $I_k$ which define the strata of parameter values $u$ such that $\delta(C_u)\leq k$. In the process we find an unexpected Lie algebra and a still mysterious canonical deformation of the module structure of the critical space over the discriminant. Much of this work is experimental - a crucial gap in understanding still needs bridging.[-]