Harer, John L. The cohomology of the moduli space of curves. (English) Zbl 0707.14020 Theory of moduli, Lect. 3rd Sess. Cent. Int. Mat. Estivo, Montecatini Terme/Italy 1985, Lect. Notes Math. 1337, 138-221 (1988). [For the entire collection see Zbl 0638.00010.] This article is a survey paper dealing with some topological and geometrical aspects of the moduli space of curves. Some papers of the author and work of Scott Wolpert on the Weil-Petersson geometry of moduli space are discussed. The main question is how much of the topology and formal geometry of a symmetric space can be found for the Teichmüller space and how many of properties of arithmetical group can be found for the mapping class group. Reviewer: E.Bujalance Cited in 16 Documents MSC: 14H10 Families, moduli of curves (algebraic) 30F60 Teichmüller theory for Riemann surfaces Keywords:moduli space of curves; Teichmüller space; mapping class group Citations:Zbl 0638.00010 PDFBibTeX XML