This paper is principally concerned with the action of the absolute Galois group on a family of dessins d'enfants i.e. isomorphism classes of coverings of the projective line unramified outside three points. More precisely, we prove a generalisation of a conjecture proposed by Yu. Kotchetkov in 1997. The main tool used in this work is a correspondence between dessins d'enfants and ribbon graphs arising from the theory of Strebel differentials.

The rank 4 locus of a general skew-symmetric 7 × 7 matrix gives the Pfaffian variety in P20 which is not defined as a complete intersection. Intersecting this with a general P6 gives a Calabi–Yau manifold. An orbifold construction seems to give the 1-parameter mirror-family of this. However, corresponding to two points in the 1-parameter family of complex structures, both with maximally unipotent monodromy, are two different mirror-maps: one corresponding to the general Pfaffian section, the other to a general intersection of G(2,7) ⊂ P20 with a P13. Apparently, the Pfaffian and G(2,7) sections constitute different parts of the A-model (Kähler structure related) moduli space, and, thus, represent different parts of the same conformal field theory moduli space.

We prove a conjecture of Duke on the number of elliptic curves over the rationals of bounded height which have exceptional primes.

Serre's nonnegativity conjecture for intersection multiplicities has recently been proven by O. Gabber. In this paper we investigate Serre's positivity conjecture using the methods which he developed. We show in particular that the positivity conjecture has implications for properties of symbolic powers of prime ideals in regular local rings.

For a commutative Noetherian ring A of finite Krull dimension containing the field of rational numbers, an Abelian group called the Euler class group is defined. An element of this group is attached to a projective A-module of rank = dimA and it is shown that the vanishing of this element is necessary and sufficient for P to split off a free summand of rank 1. As one of the applications of this result, it is shown that for any n-dimensional real affine domain, a projective module of rank n (with trivial determinant), all of whose generic sections have n generated vanishing ideals, necessarily splits off a free direct summand of rank 1.