Orateur: Nicolas Orentin (EPFL)
Titre: Topological recursion, dessins d'enfants and other applications.

Résumé: The topological recursion method is a formalism developed in the context of random matrix theories in order to solve an associated problem of combinatorics consisting in the enumeration of discrete surfaces. This inductive procedure allows to enumerate such surfaces of arbitrary topology out of the genus 0 data. This theory has further been formalized out of the context of random matrices and mysteriously solved many problems of enumerative geometry using a universal inductive procedure.
In the first part of this talk, which only uses elementary combinatorics, I will present this topological recursion procedure in a simple example consisting in the enumeration of dessins d'enfants, i.e. the enumeration of clean Belyi maps.
In the second part of the talk, I will present some of the applications of the general formalism such as the enumeration of simple Hurwitz covers of the sphere, the computation of Gromov-Witten invariants of Toric Calabi-Yau threefolds or of the Weil-Petersson volume of the moduli space of Riemann surfaces as well as some related conjectures. If times allows, I will explain one of the reasons for the universality of this inductive procedure from the point of view of cohomological field theories with an application to the computation of the total Chern class of the Verlinde bundle generalizing the Verlinde formula giving the dimension of the space of conformal blocks.