In moduli theory, it happens often that a moduli space is constructed as a quotient. This is a powerful tool, in fact from the quotient structure one can infer several interesting properties about the properties of the moduli space itself. In this talk, I will recall briefly a construction of the moduli stack of trigonal curves as a quotient stack, that I gave in a joint work with Vistoli a few years ago. Then I will move to a recent work with Loenne, where we draw from this construction some surprising results on the fundamental group of the moduli space, that reveals to be of completely different nature from the space of hyperelliptic curve.[-]

Malgré les succès de la théorie de Hodge non abélienne de Corlette-Simpson pour exclure que de nombreux groupes de présentation finie soient groupes fondamentaux de variétés projectives lisses (ou des groupes Kähleriens), les techniques de construction manquent. La construction de Campana du groupe fondamental orbifold d'une paire orbifolde permet de considérer le groupe fondamental des compactifications orbifolds d'une variété (ou champ) quasiprojective lisse donnée $U$ qui, si quelques précautions sont prises et sous des hypothèses raisonnables - mais pas toujours faciles a vérifier, est un groupe Kählerien. En choisissant bien la variété $U$, les groupes obtenus sont potentiellement intéressants et on utilise souvent des techniques inattendues pour établir les propriétés de leurs représentations linéaires. L'exposé fera un survey de cas particulièrement intrigants ou, par exemple, $U$ est un complément d'arrangement de droites, une variété localement complexe hyperbolique non compacte ou un espace de modules de courbes pointées.[-]

The absolute Galois group of the rational numbers acts on the various flavours (profinite, prounipotent, pro-$\ell$) of the fundamental group of a smooth projective curve over the rationals. The image of the corresponding homomorphism normalizes the image of the profinite mapping class group in the automorphism group of the geometric fundamental group of the curve. The image of the Galois action modulo these “geometric automorphisms” is independent of the curve. A basic problem is to determine this image. This talk is a report on a joint project with Francis Brown whose goal is to understand the image mod geometric automorphisms in the prounipotent case. Standard arguments reduce the problem to one in genus 1, where one can approach the problem by studying the periods of iterated integrals of modular forms and their relation to multiple zeta values.[-]

For a long time people have been interested in finding and constructing curves over finite fields with many points. For genus 1 and genus 2 curves, we know how to construct curves over any finite field of defect less than 1 or 3 (respectively), i.e. with a number of points at distance at most 1 or 3 to the upper bound given by the Hasse-Weil-Serre bound. The case of genus 3 is still open after more than 40 years of research. In this talk I will take a different approach based on the random matrix theory of Katz-Sarnak, that describe the distribution of the number of points, to prove the existence, for all $\epsilon>0$, of curves of genus $g$ over $\mathbb{F}_{q}$ with more than $1+q+(2 g-\epsilon) \sqrt{q}$ points for $q$ big enough. I will also discuss some explicit constructions as well as some details about the asymmetric of the distribution of the trace of the Frobenius for curves of genus 3 .This is a joint work with J. Bergström, E. Howe and C. Ritzenthaler.[-]