#moduli spaces

[mathematikerin-freyja]

It's not fair that it's so complicated to construct <insert any of the cool moduli spaces here>...... :( A girl just wants to have a concrete construction of her favourite objects.... is that too much to ask?

[eka-mark]

R. C. Penner

Techniques from moduli spaces are applied to biological macromolecules. The first main result provides new a priori constraints on protein geometry discovered empirically and confirmed computationally. The second main result identifies up to homotopy the natural moduli space of several interacting RNA molecules with the Riemann moduli space of a surface with several boundary components in each fixed genus. Applications to RNA folding prediction are discussed. The mathematical and biological frameworks are surveyed and presented from first principles.

[thetwomeatmeal]

For example think of a variable elliptic curve in characteristic p, and put your fingers on the geometric points of order p; you feel that these come together when you specialize to a supersingular elliptic curve.

Ke-Zheng Li and Frans Oort, Moduli of Supersingular Abelian Varieties, Lecture Notes in Mathematics 1680 (1991)