From handbookofmoduli@gmail.com Fri Jun 5 12:57:56 2009 Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 09:57:14 -0700 From: Handbook of Moduli To: Dan Abramovich Subject: Invitation to Contribute to a Handbook of Moduli Dear Dan Moduli spaces are an increasingly important central topic in algebraic geometry and adjacent fields. Despite major advances in our understanding of moduli spaces, no general survey exists that makes the many different facets of this theory accessible to non-specialists. We are writing to invite you to participate in the preparation of a Handbook of Moduli aimed at bridging this gap. The Handbook will attempt to provide broad coverage of the major topics of moduli theory. It will include sections on the theory of important classes of moduli spaces such as curves (from both algebro-geometric and topological viewpoints), abelian varieties, Calabi-Yau varieties, vector bundles and sheaves, and higher dimensional varieties. Complementing these will be sections dealing with tools important across the field such as geometric invariant theory, Hodge theory, deformation theory and stacks. The goal of the Handbook is to introduce the specialized techniques, examples and results essential to each topic, and to say enough about recent developments to prepare the reader to tackle the primary literature in the area. We are especially interested in contributions that illustrate "secret handshakes", yogas and heuristics that you use to guide intuition or simplify calculation but that are replaced by more formal arguments, or simply do not appear, in articles aimed at other specialists. A bit of background. The idea of such a Handbook was originally proposed by David Mumford to Lizhen Ji in 2006. Lizhen and David produced a draft table of contents that was circulated at the Symposium marking David's retirement from Brown in 2007. The project was delayed by work on the second volume of Mumford's Collected Papers edited by Ching-Li Chai, Amnon Neeman and Takahiro Shiota and we agreed to take over editorship this spring. The Handbook will appear as a volume, dedicated to David, in the series Advanced Lectures in Mathematics (http://intlpress.com/books/ALM_Series.htm), published by the International Press, of which Lizhen is Series Editor. It would be especially helpful for the Handbook to have a contribution from you on log structures as this is both a topic that we think it essential to include and one that you are uniquely qualified to explain. However, if you wish to propose another topic, please let us know and we would be happy to try to find a way to accommodate you. If, as we hope, you are willing to accept our invitation, our schedule calls for drafts to be submitted for review by January, 2010. We would be grateful for an indication of your interest in contributing to the Handbook in the next month. Meanwhile, if you have any other questions about the Handbook, please do not hesitate to contact either of us. Email sent to this account (handbookofmoduli@gmail.com) will reach both of us. Warmest regards, Gavril Farkas Ian Morrison