Masur-Veech volumes, frequencies of simple closed geodesics, and intersection numbers of moduli spaces of curves (Q821492)

In recent years, both the Weil-Petersson volumes of spaces of hyperbolic structures \(M_g\) and the Masur-Veech volumes of spaces of holomorphic quadratic differentials \(Q_g\) on surfaces have been explicitly calculated, in important work of Mirzakhani, Eskin, Zorich, Masur, Goujard, and others. The relationship between these two familes of volumes has not been made explicit, however, even though it seems clear they are closely related. The paper under review gives a more explicit connection between these computations, via ideas of lattice point counting, bringing together interesting ideas from geometry, combinatorics, and number theory, among others. As a striking application, the authors compute explicitly the asymptotic frequencies of separating and nonseparating simple closed geodesics on a closed hyperbolic surface of genus \(g\) for all small genera \(g\).