We study the Rouquier dimension of wrapped Fukaya categories of Liouville manifolds and pairs, and apply this invariant to various problems in algebraic and symplectic geometry. On the algebro-geometric side, we introduce a new method based on symplectic flexibility and mirror symmetry to bound the Rouquier dimension of derived categories of coherent sheaves on certain complex algebraic varieties and stacks. These bounds are sharp in dimension at most $3$. As an application, we resolve a well-known conjecture of Orlov for new classes of examples (e.g. toric $3$-folds, certain log Calabi–Yau surfaces). We also discuss applications to non-commutative motives on partially wrapped Fukaya categories. On the symplectic side, we study various quantitative questions including the following. (1) Given a Weinstein manifold, what is the minimal number of intersection points between the skeleton and its image under a generic compactly supported Hamiltonian diffeomorphism? (2) What is the minimal number of critical points of a Lefschetz fibration on a Liouville manifold with Weinstein fibers? We give lower bounds for these quantities which are to the best of the authors’ knowledge the first to go beyond the basic flexible/rigid dichotomy.

We present a quantitative isolation property of the lifts of properly immersed geodesic planes in the frame bundle of a geometrically finite hyperbolic $3$-manifold. Our estimates are polynomials in the tight areas and Bowen–Margulis–Sullivan densities of geodesic planes, with degree given by the modified critical exponents.

One fundamental consequence of a scheme $X$ being proper is that the functor classifying maps from $X$ to any other suitably nice scheme or algebraic stack is representable by an algebraic stack. This result has been generalized by replacing $X$ with a proper algebraic stack. We show, however, that it also holds when $X$ is replaced by many examples of algebraic stacks which are not proper, including many global quotient stacks. This leads us to revisit the definition of properness for stacks. We introduce the notion of a formally proper morphism of stacks and study its properties. We develop methods for establishing formal properness in a large class of examples. Along the way, we prove strong $h$-descent results which hold in the setting of derived algebraic geometry but not in classical algebraic geometry. Our main applications are algebraicity results for mapping stacks and the stack of coherent sheaves on a flat and formally proper stack.

We give cases in which nearby cycles commute with pushforward from sheaves on the moduli stack of shtukas to a product of curves over a finite field. The proof systematically uses the property that taking nearby cycles of Satake sheaves on the Beilinson–Drinfeld Grassmannian with parahoric reduction is a central functor together with a ‘Zorro's lemma’ argument similar to that of Xue [Smoothness of cohomology sheaves of stacks of shtukas, Preprint (2020), arXiv:2012.12833]. As an application, for automorphic forms at the parahoric level, we characterize the image of tame inertia under the Langlands correspondence in terms of two-sided cells.

Let $f : X \to S$ be a family of smooth projective algebraic varieties over a smooth connected quasi-projective base $S$, and let $\mathbb {V} = R^{2k} f_{*} \mathbb {Z}(k)$ be the integral variation of Hodge structure coming from degree $2k$ cohomology it induces. Associated to $\mathbb {V}$ one has the so-called Hodge locus $\textrm {HL}(S) \subset S$, which is a countable union of ‘special’ algebraic subvarieties of $S$ parametrizing those fibres of $\mathbb {V}$ possessing extra Hodge tensors (and so, conjecturally, those fibres of $f$ possessing extra algebraic cycles). The special subvarieties belong to a larger class of so-called weakly special subvarieties, which are subvarieties of $S$ maximal for their algebraic monodromy groups. For each positive integer $d$, we give an algorithm to compute the set of all weakly special subvarieties $Z \subset S$ of degree at most $d$ (with the degree taken relative to a choice of projective compactification $S \subset \overline {S}$ and very ample line bundle $\mathcal {L}$ on $\overline {S}$). As a corollary of our algorithm we prove conjectures of Daw–Ren and Daw–Javanpeykar–Kühne on the finiteness of sets of special and weakly special subvarieties of bounded degree.