This paper is about the reduced group $C^{\ast }$-algebras of real reductive groups, and about Hilbert $C^{\ast }$-modules over these $C^{\ast }$-algebras. We shall do three things. First, we shall apply theorems from the tempered representation theory of reductive groups to determine the structure of the reduced $C^{\ast }$-algebra (the result has been known for some time, but it is difficult to assemble a full treatment from the existing literature). Second, we shall use the structure of the reduced $C^{\ast }$-algebra to determine the structure of the Hilbert $C^{\ast }$-bimodule that represents the functor of parabolic induction. Third, we shall prove that the parabolic induction bimodule admits a secondary inner product, using which we can define a functor of parabolic restriction in tempered representation theory. We shall prove in a sequel to this paper that parabolic restriction is adjoint, on both the left and the right, to parabolic induction in the context of tempered unitary Hilbert space representations.

Let $C$ be a smooth, separated and geometrically connected curve over a finitely generated field $k$ of characteristic $p\geqslant 0$ , $\unicode[STIX]{x1D702}$ the generic point of $C$ and $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}_{1}(C)$ its étale fundamental group. Let $f:X\rightarrow C$ be a smooth proper morphism, and $i\geqslant 0$ , $j$ integers. To the family of continuous $\mathbb{F}_{\ell }$ -linear representations $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}_{1}(C)\rightarrow \text{GL}(R^{i}f_{\ast }\mathbb{F}_{\ell }(j)_{\overline{\unicode[STIX]{x1D702}}})$ (where $\ell$ runs over primes $\neq p$ ), one can attach families of abstract modular curves $C_{0}(\ell )$ and $C_{1}(\ell )$ , which, in this setting, are the analogues of the usual modular curves $Y_{0}(\ell )$ and $Y_{1}(\ell )$ . If $i\not =2j$ , it is conjectured that the geometric and arithmetic gonalities of these abstract modular curves go to infinity with $\ell$ (for the geometric gonality, under a certain necessary condition). We prove the conjecture for the arithmetic gonality of the abstract modular curves $C_{1}(\ell )$ . We also obtain partial results for the growth of the geometric gonality of $C_{0}(\ell )$ and $C_{1}(\ell )$ . The common strategy underlying these results consists in reducing by specialization theory to the case where the base field $k$ is finite in order to apply techniques of counting rational points.

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 $p_{n+m}-p_{n}\leqslant {\it\epsilon}\log x$.

Building on Seidel and Solomon’s fundamental work [Symplectic cohomology and$q$-intersection numbers, Geom. Funct. Anal. 22 (2012), 443–477], we define the notion of a $\mathfrak{g}$-equivariant Lagrangian brane in an exact symplectic manifold $M$, where $\mathfrak{g}\subset SH^{1}(M)$ is a sub-Lie algebra of the symplectic cohomology of $M$. When $M$ is a (symplectic) mirror to an (algebraic) homogeneous space $G/P$, homological mirror symmetry predicts that there is an embedding of $\mathfrak{g}$ in $SH^{1}(M)$. This allows us to study a mirror theory to classical constructions of Borel, Weil and Bott. We give explicit computations recovering all finite-dimensional irreducible representations of $\mathfrak{sl}_{2}$ as representations on the Floer cohomology of an $\mathfrak{sl}_{2}$-equivariant Lagrangian brane and discuss generalizations to arbitrary finite-dimensional semisimple Lie algebras.

We obtain an algorithm computing the Chern–Schwartz–MacPherson (CSM) classes of Schubert cells in a generalized flag manifold $G/B$ . In analogy to how the ordinary divided difference operators act on Schubert classes, each CSM class of a Schubert class is obtained by applying certain Demazure–Lusztig-type operators to the CSM class of a cell of dimension one less. These operators define a representation of the Weyl group on the homology of $G/B$ . By functoriality, we deduce algorithmic expressions for CSM classes of Schubert cells in any flag manifold $G/P$ . We conjecture that the CSM classes of Schubert cells are an effective combination of (homology) Schubert classes, and prove that this is the case in several classes of examples. We also extend our results and conjecture to the torus equivariant setting.

Building on coprincipal mesoprimary decomposition [Kahle and Miller, Decompositions of commutative monoid congruences and binomial ideals, Algebra and Number Theory 8 (2014), 1297–1364], we combinatorially construct an irreducible decomposition of any given binomial ideal. In a parallel manner, for congruences in commutative monoids we construct decompositions that are direct combinatorial analogues of binomial irreducible decompositions, and for binomial ideals we construct decompositions into ideals that are as irreducible as possible while remaining binomial. We provide an example of a binomial ideal that is not an intersection of irreducible binomial ideals, thus answering a question of Eisenbud and Sturmfels [Binomial ideals, Duke Math. J. 84 (1996), 1–45].