Little survey on I/OM and its variants and their relation to (variants of) \(\widehat{GT}\) -- old \& new (Q2139840)

The article under review provides a nicely written overview on the past and recent states of arts on the question (called the I/OM, viz. Ihara/Oda-Matsumoto problem) asking how much the absolute Galois group \(G_K\) of a field \(K\) can be recovered from the collection of outer automorphism groups of the étale fundamental groups arising from a class of algebraic varieties over \(K\). The question is closely related to generalization of the notion of the Grothendieck-Teichmüller group \(\widehat{GT}\) that is expected to recover \(G_\mathbb{Q}\), the absolute Galois group of the rational number field \(\mathbb{Q}\), in terms of the geometric fundamental groups of the moduli stacks of algebraic curves. The (classical) I/OM problem asks the same question by considering the geometric fundamental groups of all algebraic varieties over \(\mathbb{Q}\) and is settled in a stronger form with the birational method in [\textit{F. Pop}, Invent. Math. 216, No. 3, 745--797 (2019; Zbl 1477.14041)]. In the last primary section of the present survey article is discussed a recent collaboration of the author with \textit{A. Topaz} [``A linear variant of GT'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:2104.10504}] where certain ``line/hyperplane \(\Lambda\)-abelian-by-central variants'' of \(\widehat{GT}\) are introduced to study so as to be isomorphic to \(G_\mathbb{Q}\).