I will present a new trace formula approach to Waldspurger's formula for toric periods of automorphic forms on $PGL_2$. The method is motivated by interpreting Waldspurger's result as a period relation on $SO_2 \times SO_3$, which leads to a strange comparison of relative trace formulas. I will explain the local results needed to carry out this comparison, and discuss some small progress towards extending these results to high rank orthogonal groups.

We will discuss the conjecture of Kolyvagin on the indivisibility of Heegner points and its role in constructing rational points on elliptic curves over rational numbers, particularly in the proof of a recent result of this type: "the Selmer rank being one implies that the Mordell--Weil rank being one".

The speaker will discuss recent work on Manin's theory of zeta polynomials for modular forms. He will describe recent results which confirm Manin's speculation that there is such a theory which arises from periods of newforms. More precisely, for each even weight k>2 newform f, the speaker will describe a canonical polynomial Zf(s) which satisfies a functional equation of the form Zf(s)=Zf(1−s), and also satisfies the Riemann Hypothesis: if Zf(ρ)=0, then Re(ρ)=1/2. This zeta function is arithmetic in nature in that it encodes the moments of the critical values of L(f,s). This work builds on earlier results of many people on period polynomials of modular forms. This is joint work with Seokho Jin, Wenjun Ma, Larry Rolen, Kannan Soundararajan, and Florian Sprung.

Kazhdan and Patterson constructed generalized theta representations on covers of general linear groups as multi-residues of the Borel Eisenstein series. These representations and their unique models were used by Bump and Ginzburg in the Rankin-Selberg constructions of the symmetric square L-functions for GL(r). In this talk, we will discuss the two other types of models that the theta representations may support. We first talk about semi-Whittaker models, which generalize the models used in the work of Bump and Ginzburg. Secondly, we determine the unipotent orbits attached to theta functions, in the sense of Ginzburg. We also determine the covers when these models are unique. Time permitting, we will discuss some applications in Rankin-Selberg constructions.