In this paper we propose and discuss implications of a general conjecture that there is a natural action of a rank 1 double affine Hecke algebra on the Kauffman bracket skein module of the complement of a knot $K\subset S^{3}$ . We prove this in a number of nontrivial cases, including all $(2,2p+1)$ torus knots, the figure eight knot, and all 2-bridge knots (when $q=\pm 1$ ). As the main application of the conjecture, we construct three-variable polynomial knot invariants that specialize to the classical colored Jones polynomials introduced by Reshetikhin and Turaev. We also deduce some new properties of the classical Jones polynomials and prove that these hold for all knots (independently of the conjecture). We furthermore conjecture that the skein module of the unknot is a submodule of the skein module of an arbitrary knot. We confirm this for the same example knots, and we show that this implies that the colored Jones polynomials of $K$ satisfy an inhomogeneous recursion relation.

Let $G$ be a real reductive group and $Z=G/H$ a unimodular homogeneous $G$ space. The space $Z$ is said to satisfy VAI (vanishing at infinity) if all smooth vectors in the Banach representations $L^{p}(Z)$ vanish at infinity, $1\leqslant p<\infty$ . For $H$ connected we show that $Z$ satisfies VAI if and only if it is of reductive type.

We prove that the tautological ring of ${\mathcal{M}}_{2,n}^{\mathsf{ct}}$ , the moduli space of $n$ -pointed genus two curves of compact type, does not have Poincaré duality for any $n\geqslant 8$ . This result is obtained via a more general study of the cohomology groups of ${\mathcal{M}}_{2,n}^{\mathsf{ct}}$ . We explain how the cohomology can be decomposed into pieces corresponding to different local systems and how the tautological cohomology can be identified within this decomposition. Our results allow the computation of $H^{k}({\mathcal{M}}_{2,n}^{\mathsf{ct}})$ for any $k$ and $n$ considered both as $\mathbb{S}_{n}$ -representation and as mixed Hodge structure/ $\ell$ -adic Galois representation considered up to semi-simplification. A consequence of our results is also that all even cohomology of $\overline{{\mathcal{M}}}_{2,n}$ is tautological for $n<20$ , and that the tautological ring of $\overline{{\mathcal{M}}}_{2,n}$ fails to have Poincaré duality for all $n\geqslant 20$ . This improves and simplifies results of the author and Orsola Tommasi.

In this paper we prove that a smooth family of canonically polarized manifolds parametrized by a special (in the sense of Campana) quasi-projective variety is isotrivial.

Given a family of varieties $X\rightarrow \mathbb{P}^{n}$ over a number field, we determine conditions under which there is a Brauer–Manin obstruction to weak approximation for 100% of the fibres which are everywhere locally soluble.

We compute the image of any choice of complex conjugation on the Galois representations associated to regular algebraic cuspidal automorphic representations and to torsion classes in the cohomology of locally symmetric spaces for $\text{GL}_{n}$ over a totally real field $F$ .

We consider the distribution of the polygonal paths joining partial sums of classical Kloosterman sums $\text{Kl}_{p}(a)$ , as $a$ varies over $\mathbf{F}_{p}^{\times }$ and as $p$ tends to infinity. Using independence of Kloosterman sheaves, we prove convergence in the sense of finite distributions to a specific random Fourier series. We also consider Birch sums, for which we can establish convergence in law in the space of continuous functions. We then derive some applications.

We prove a generalization of the author’s work to show that any subset of the primes which is ‘well distributed’ in arithmetic progressions contains many primes which are close together. Moreover, our bounds hold with some uniformity in the parameters. As applications, we show there are infinitely many intervals of length $(\log x)^{{\it\epsilon}}$ containing $\gg _{{\it\epsilon}}\log \log x$ primes, and show lower bounds of the correct order of magnitude for the number of strings of $m$ congruent primes with $p_{n+m}-p_{n}\leqslant {\it\epsilon}\log x$ .