Playing billiards on a Euclidean ``rational-angled'' polygon can be viewed as following straight lines on an associated flat (real) surface. When the flat surface has a large appropriate symmetry group, there is an associated algebraic complex curve in the space parametrizing the equivalence classes of complex curves of a fixed genus. In the talk, I will hint at some of these ideas, mainly with pictures.
This is a talk in the Math 599 seminar series for Math graduate students.