In unpublished notes, Pila discussed some theory surrounding the modular function j and its derivatives. A focal point of these notes was the statement of two conjectures regarding j, j′ and j″: a Zilber–Pink-type statement incorporating j, j′ and j″, which was an extension of an apparently weaker conjecture of André–Oort type. In this paper, I first cover some background regarding j, j′ and j″, mostly covering the work already done by Pila. Then I use a seemingly novel adaptation of the o-minimal Pila–Zannier strategy to prove a weakened version of Pila's ‘Modular André–Oort with Derivatives’ conjecture. Under the assumption of a certain number-theoretic conjecture, the central theorem of the paper implies Pila's conjecture in full generality, as well as a more precise statement along the same lines.

We show that Ribet sections are the only obstruction to the validity of the relative Manin–Mumford conjecture for one-dimensional families of semi-abelian surfaces. Applications include special cases of the Zilber–Pink conjecture for curves in a mixed Shimura variety of dimension 4, as well as the study of polynomial Pell equations with non-separable discriminants.

We consider the analogue of the André–Oort conjecture for Drinfeld modular varieties which was formulated by Breuer. We prove this analogue for special points with separable reflex field over the base field by adapting methods which were used by Klingler and Yafaev to prove the André–Oort conjecture under the generalized Riemann hypothesis in the classical case. Our result extends results of Breuer showing the correctness of the analogue for special points lying in a curve and for special points having a certain behaviour at a fixed set of primes.

We provide an unconditional proof of the André–Oort conjecture for the coarse moduli space 𝒜2,1 of principally polarized abelian surfaces, following the strategy outlined by Pila–Zannier.

According to the André–Oort conjecture, an algebraic curve in Y (1)n that is not equal to a special subvariety contains only finitely many points which correspond to ann-tuple of elliptic curves with complex multiplication. Pink’s conjecture generalizes the André–Oort conjecture to the extent that if the curve is not contained in a special subvariety of positive codimension, then it is expected to meet the union of all special subvarieties of codimension two in only finitely many points. We prove this for a large class of curves in Y (1)n. When restricting to special subvarieties of codimension two that are not strongly special we obtain finiteness for all curves defined over . Finally, we formulate and prove a variant of the Mordell–Lang conjecture for subvarieties of Y (1)n.

this note extends a result of moonen on the zariski closure of some sets of special points in the moduli space of principally polarised abelian varieties of dimension g to the case of any shimura variety, by a completely different method.