Mathematics

A period can be roughly defined as the integral of an algebraic differential form over a cycle. Following Konsevic-Zagier's paper "Periods", I will give some examples of periods and a conjecture about their relations. The second part of the talk will be about the connection between periods and Picard Fuchs differential equations; these are constructed by differentiating cohomology classes, and I will show this explicitly in the case of curves. Finally, I will move to an abstract definition of periods and show how from this we can construct a category of mixed motives.