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The circle method has been successfully used over the last century to study rational points on hypersurfaces. More recently, a version of the method over function fields, combined with spreading out techniques, has led to a range of results about moduli spaces of rational curves on hypersurfaces. In this paper a version of the circle method is implemented in the setting of the Grothendieck ring of varieties. This allows us to approximate the classes of these moduli spaces directly, without relying on point counting, and leads to a deeper understanding of their geometry., Comment: 52 pages

We define an enrichment of the logarithmic derivative of the zeta function of a variety over a finite field to a power series with coefficients in the Grothendieck--Witt group. We show that this enrichment is related to the topology of the real points of a lift. For cellular schemes over a field, we prove a rationality result for this enriched logarithmic derivative of the zeta function as an analogue of part of the Weil conjectures. We also compute several examples, including toric varieties, and show that the enrichment is a motivic measure., Comment: 41 pages, to appear in Transactions of the AMS

We introduce the Hadamard topology on the Witt ring of rational functions, giving a simultaneous refinement of the weight and point-counting topologies. Zeta functions of algebraic varieties over finite fields are elements of the rational Witt ring, and the Hadamard topology allows for a conjectural unification of results in arithmetic and motivic statistics: The completion of the Witt ring for the Hadamard topology can be identified with a space of meromorphic functions which we call Hadamard functions, and we make the meta-conjecture that any "natural" sequence of zeta functions which converges to a Hadamard function in both the weight and point-counting topologies converges also in the Hadamard topology. For statistics arising from Bertini problems, zero-cycles or the Batyrev-Manin conjecture, this yields an explicit conjectural unification of existing results in motivic and arithmetic statistics that were previously connected only by analogy. As evidence for our conjectures, we show that Hadamard convergence holds for many natural statistics arising from zero-cycles, as well as for the motivic height zeta function associated to the motivic Batyrev-Manin problem for split toric varieties., Comment: Corrected proof in section 6, + minor edits. 55 pages; comments welcome!

We formulate and prove an analog of Poonen's finite-field Bertini theorem with Taylor conditions that holds in the Grothendieck ring of varieties. This gives a broad generalization of the work of Vakil-Wood, who treated the case of smooth hypersurface sections. In fact, our techniques give analogs in motivic statistics of all known results in arithmetic statistics that have been proven using Poonen's sieve, including work of Bucur-Kedlaya on complete intersections and Erman-Wood on semi-ample Bertini theorems. A key ingredient is the use of motivic Euler products, as introduced by the first author, to write down candidate motivic probabilities. We also formulate a conjecture on the uniform convergence of zeta functions that unifies motivic and arithmetic statistics for varieties over finite fields., Comment: 69 pages, comments welcome

A motivic height zeta function associated to a family of varieties parametrised by a curve is the generating series of the classes, in the Grothendieck ring of varieties, of moduli spaces of sections of this family with varying degrees. This text is devoted to the study of the motivic height zeta function associated to a family of varieties with generic fiber having the structure of an equivariant compactification of a vector group. Our main theorem describes the convergence of this motivic height zeta function with respect to a topology on the Grothendieck ring of varieties coming from the theory of weights in cohomology. We deduce from it the asymptotic behaviour, as the degree goes to infinity, of a positive proportion of the coefficients of the Hodge-Deligne polynomial of the above moduli spaces: in particular, we get an estimate for their dimension and the number of components of maximal dimension. The main tools for this are a notion of motivic Euler product for series with coefficients in the Grothendieck ring of varieties, an extension of Hrushovski and Kazhdan's motivic Poisson summation formula, and a motivic measure on the Grothendieck ring of varieties with exponentials constructed using Denef and Loeser's motivic vanishing cycles., Comment: This is an updated version of the author's PhD thesis. Comments welcome!

These are expanded notes of the mini-courses on Pila's work that Yuri Bilu gave in Basel in April 2011, Yaroslavl in August 2011 and Chennai in February 2012. The topics covered include the Bombieri-Pila theorem, its extensions and applications to some prominent conjectures (Manin-Mumford, Andr\'e-Oort)., Comment: Lecture notes; accepted for publication at the "EMS Surveys in Mathematical Sciences"