Curves in the complex projective planes can be viewed as PL-submanifolds. Taking this perspective allows to deduce a number of interesting results about them. The goal of these lectures is two-fold: first, I will give a topological description of some algebro-geometric objects (singularities and Milnor fibres, curves, blow-ups), and then I will talk about some topological tools one can use to study complex curves. I will focus on rational cuspidal curves (those which are homeomorphic to spheres) and line arrangements (collections of lines).

Curves in the complex projective planes can be viewed as PL-submanifolds. Taking this perspective allows to deduce a number of interesting results about them. The goal of these lectures is two-fold: first, I will give a topological description of some algebro-geometric objects (singularities and Milnor fibres, curves, blow-ups), and then I will talk about some topological tools one can use to study complex curves. I will focus on rational cuspidal curves (those which are homeomorphic to spheres) and line arrangements (collections of lines).

Curves in the complex projective planes can be viewed as PL-submanifolds. Taking this perspective allows to deduce a number of interesting results about them. The goal of these lectures is two-fold: first, I will give a topological description of some algebro-geometric objects (singularities and Milnor fibres, curves, blow-ups), and then I will talk about some topological tools one can use to study complex curves. I will focus on rational cuspidal curves (those which are homeomorphic to spheres) and line arrangements (collections of lines).

Curves in the complex projective planes can be viewed as PL-submanifolds. Taking this perspective allows to deduce a number of interesting results about them. The goal of these lectures is two-fold: first, I will give a topological description of some algebro-geometric objects (singularities and Milnor fibres, curves, blow-ups), and then I will talk about some topological tools one can use to study complex curves. I will focus on rational cuspidal curves (those which are homeomorphic to spheres) and line arrangements (collections of lines).

Hirzebruch proved a beautiful inequality for complex line arrangements in CP^2, giving strong bounds on the their combinatorics. In the quest for a topological proof of this inequality, Paolo Aceto and I studied odd and even line arrangements (which I will define in the talk). We proved Hirzebruch-like inequalities for these arrangements, and drew some corollaries about configurations of lines. Time (and audience) permitting, I will also discuss some more speculative ideas and generalisations of our results.

Any reasonable exotic phenomena in simply-connected 4-manifolds are unstable. It is an open question if there is an universal upper bound to the number of stabilizations needed. The case of 1 stabilization was proven in works of Lin and Guth-K., but whether we need more than two stabilizations has been open because it is significantly harder. In this talk, we discuss my recent proof with Park and Taniguchi that two stabilizations are indeed not enough for exotic diffeomorphisms.