aDepartment of Mathematics, Stanford University, 450 Serra Mall, Bldg. 380, Stanford, CA 94305-2125, USA
bDepartment of Mathematics, University of Utah, 155 South 1400 East, Room 233, Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA
Abstract:
This paper is an elementary introduction to the theory of moduli spaces of curves and maps. As an application to enumerative geometry, we show how to count the number of bitangent lines to a projective plane curve of degree d by doing intersection theory on moduli spaces.