The theme of the talk is around the theory of Igusa's local zeta functions, his broader program on local global principles, and recent progress on these via singularity theory and the minimal model program with M. Mustata and K. H. Nguyen. I will also present some new open questions that push Igusa's program further, and partial evidence obtained with K. H. Nguyen.

We fix an o-minimal expansion of the real field, M say. Definabilitynotions are with respect to M. Let F = {f_x : x in X} be a definable familyof (single valued) complex analytic functions, each one having domain somedisk, D_x say, in ?, where the parameter space X is a definable subset of ?^mfor some m. We present some finiteness theorems for such families F whichare uniform in parameters and give some applications.We also speculate on the notion of “definable” Riemann surface.

A field K is called pseudo-algebraically closed (PAC) if every absolutely irreducible variety defined over K has a K-rational point. These fields were introduced by Ax in his characterization of pseudo-finite fields and have since become an important object of study in both model theory and field arithmetic. We will explain how the analysis of a PAC field often reduces to questions about the model theory of the absolute group and describe how these reductions combine with a graph-coding construction of Cherlin, van den Dries, and Macintyre together with to […]

Real semialgebraic sets admit so-called cellular decomposition, i.e. representation as a union of convenient semialgebraic images of standard cubes. The Gromov-Yomdin Lemma (later generalized by Pila and Wilkie) proves that the maps could be chosen of C^r-smooth norm at most one, and the number of such maps is uniformly bounded for finite-dimensional families. This number was not effectively bounded by Yomdin or Gromov, but itnecessarily grows as r ? ?. It turns out there is a natural obstruction to a naive holomorphic complexification of this result related to the natural […]

Tame geometry is the study of structures where the definable sets admit finite complexity. Around 15 years ago Pila and Wilkie discovered a deep connection between tame geometry and diophantine approximation, in the form of asymptotic estimates on the number of rational points in a tame set (as a function of height). This later led to deep applications in diophantine geometry, functional transcendence and Hodge theory.I will describe some conjectures and a long-term project around a more effective form of tame geometry, suited for improving the quality of the diophantine […]