Christian Schnell will speak on

Degenerating COMPLEX variations of Hodge structure

Abstract: In a famous paper that is now almost 50 years old, Schmid analyzed the behavior of polarized rational variations of Hodge structure on the punctured disk. His results are often summarized by saying that “the limit of a family of Hodge structures is a mixed Hodge structure”. I will talk about a new and more conceptual proof for Schmid’s results that applies to complex variations of Hodge structure. In particular, we will see that the asymptotic behavior of a polarized variation of Hodge structure is really very simple, if you look at it from the right point of view.