The topic of this course is the discrete subgroups of semisimple Lie groups. We discuss a criterion that ensures that such a subgroup is arithmetic. This criterion is a joint work with Sébastien Miquel, which extends previous work of Selberg and Hee Oh and solves an old conjecture of Margulis. We focus on concrete examples like the group $\mathrm {SL}(d,{\mathbb {R}})$ and we explain how classical tools and new techniques enter the proof: the Auslander projection theorem, the Bruhat decomposition, the Mahler compactness criterion, the Borel density theorem, the Borel–Harish-Chandra finiteness theorem, the Howe–Moore mixing theorem, the Dani–Margulis recurrence theorem, the Raghunathan–Venkataramana finite-index subgroup theorem and so on.

We investigate subgroups of $\text{SL}(n,\mathbb{Z})$ which preserve an open nondegenerate convex cone in $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ and admit in that cone as fundamental domain a polyhedral cone of which some faces are allowed to lie on the boundary. Examples are arithmetic groups acting on self-dual cones, Weyl groups of certain Kac–Moody algebras, and they do occur in algebraic geometry as the automorphism groups of projective manifolds acting on their ample cones.

The moduli space of principally polarized Abelian varieties with real structure and with level N = 4m structure (with m≥1) is shown to coincide with the set of real points of a quasi-projective algebraic variety defined over ${\open Q}$, and to consist of finitely many copies of the quotient of the space GL(n, ${\open R}$)/O(N) (of positive definite symmetric matrices) by the principal congruence subgroup of level N in GL(n, ${\open Z}$).

The local intersection cohomology of a point in the Baily–Borel compactification (of a Hermitian locally symmetric space) is shown to be canonically isomorphic to the weighted cohomology of a certain linear locally symmetric space (an arithmetic quotient of the associated self-adjoint homogeneous cone). Explicit computations are given for the symplectic group in four variables.