Speaker: Ishan Banerjee
Date: May 14, 2026
Affiliation: Ohio State University

Abstract: Given an algebraic surface $X$ and an embedding $X \to \mathbb{P}^N$, we can construct the family of smooth hyperplane sections of $X$ arising from the embedding. Let $C$ denote a fixed hyperplane section, this is a curve of some genus $g$. The above family of curves induces a monodromy representation, with target ${\operatorname{Mod}}(C)$ the mapping class group of $C$. In the case when $X$ is simply connected and the embedding is sufficiently ample, we determine that the image of this representation is a finite index subgroup of the mapping class group. This is based on joint work with Nick Salter.