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Anabelian geometry

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Formulation of a conjecture of Grothendieck on curves

The "anabelian question" has been formulated as

How much information about the isomorphism class of the variety X is contained in the knowledge of the étale fundamental group

A concrete example is the case of curves, which may be affine as well as projective. Suppose given a hyperbolic curve C, i.e., the complement of n points in a projective algebraic curve of genus g, taken to be smooth and irreducible, defined over a field K that is finitely generated (over its prime field), such that

2−2g−n<0.

Grothendieck conjectured that the algebraic fundamental group G of C, a profinite group, determines C itself (i.e., the isomorphism class of G determines that of C). This was proved by Mochizuki. An example is for the case of g=0 (the projective line) and n=4, when the isomorphism class of C is determined by the cross-ratio in K of the four points removed (almost, there being an order to the four points in a cross-ratio, but not in the points removed). There are also results for the case of K a local field.

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