| Résume | Online conference. Please ask for the access code by writing an email to Olivier Debarre.
We will show that the homological monodromy of the universal family of cubic threefolds, which takes values in the symplectic group Sp(10,Z), does not factor through the standard symplectic representation of the genus five mapping class group. We will explain why this is philosophically related to the well-known irrationality of cubic threefolds, and how it fits into a family of related questions which may be of interest in geometric group theory. |
