Characteristic numbers via degenerations 
-- Izzet Coskun, January 28, 2005

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 Inspired by the work of Kontsevich and aided by ideas from
physics, there has been significant progress in computing the number of
curves incident to general linear spaces in projective space. These numbers
are called the characteristic numbers of curves. In this talk I will
describe one way of extending these ideas to compute the characteristic
numbers of higher dimensional varieties. I will focus mainly on the case of
surfaces and linear spaces.