Kobayashi–Ochiai proved that the set of dominant maps from a fixed variety to a fixed variety of general type is finite. We prove the natural extension of their finiteness theorem to Campana’s orbifold pairs.

We prove new results on the distribution of rational points on ramified covers of abelian varieties over finitely generated fields $k$ of characteristic zero. For example, given a ramified cover $\pi : X \to A$, where $A$ is an abelian variety over $k$ with a dense set of $k$-rational points, we prove that there is a finite-index coset $C \subset A(k)$ such that $\pi (X(k))$ is disjoint from $C$. Our results do not seem to be in the range of other methods available at present; they confirm predictions coming from Lang's conjectures on rational points, and also go in the direction of an issue raised by Serre regarding possible applications to the inverse Galois problem. Finally, the conclusions of our work may be seen as a sharp version of Hilbert's irreducibility theorem for abelian varieties.

Let A be an abelian scheme of dimension at least four over a $\mathbb {Z}$ -finitely generated integral domain R of characteristic zero, and let L be an ample line bundle on A. We prove that the set of smooth hypersurfaces D in A representing L is finite by showing that the moduli stack of such hypersurfaces has only finitely many R-points. We accomplish this by using level structures to interpolate finiteness results between this moduli stack and the stack of canonically polarized varieties.

We prove finiteness results for sets of varieties over number fields with good reduction outside a given finite set of places using cyclic covers. We obtain a version of the Shafarevich conjecture for weighted projective surfaces, double covers of abelian varieties and reduce the Shafarevich conjecture for hypersurfaces to the case of hypersurfaces of high dimension. These are special cases of a general setup for integral points on moduli stacks of cyclic covers, and our arithmetic results are achieved via a version of the Chevalley–Weil theorem for stacks.

For any integer e and hyperbolic curve X over $\overline{\mathbb Q}$, Mochizuki showed that there are only finitely many isomorphism classes of hyperbolic curves Y of Euler characteristic e with the same universal cover as X. We use Arakelov theory to prove an effective version of this finiteness statement.