(Joint work with B. Drinovec Drnovsek, Amer. J. Math., in press.) I will discuss the existence of closed complex subvarieties of a complex manifold X that are proper holomorphic images of strongly pseudoconvex Stein domains. The main sufficient condition is expressed in terms of the Morse indices and of the number of positive Levi eigenvalues of an exhaustion function on X. Examples show that our condition cannot be weakened in general. I will describe optimal results for subvarieties of this type in complements of compact complex submanifolds with Griffiths positive normal bundle; in the projective case these generalize classical theorems of Remmert, Bishop and Narasimhan concerning proper holomorphic maps and embeddings to complex Euclidean spaces.

A 'word' is a finite or infinite sequence of symbols (called 'letters') taken from a finite non-empty set (called an 'alphabet'). In mathematics, words naturally arise when one wants to represent elements from some set (e.g., integers, real numbers, p-adic numbers, etc.) in a systematic way. For instance, expansions in integer bases (such as binary and decimal expansions) or continued fraction expansions allow us to associate with every real number a unique finite or infinite sequence of digits.

In this talk, I will discuss some old and new results in Combinatorics on Words and their applications to problems in Number Theory. In particular, by transforming inequalities between real numbers into (lexicographic) inequalities between infinite words representing their binary expansions, I will show how combinatorial properties of words can be used to completely describe the minimal intervals containing all fractional parts {x*2^n}, for some positive real number x, and for all non-negative integers n. This is joint work with Jean-Paul Allouche (Universite Paris-Sud, France).

In this talk, after a brief history of how the exceptional Lie group G_2 was discovered, I present various appearances of this group in mathematics. Its physical realisation as a symmetry group of a simple mechanical system will also be discussed.