Modular forms constructed from moduli of elliptic curves, with applications to explicit models of modular curves

Abstract

These are the lecture notes from my portion of a mini-course for the summer school "Building Bridges 3" that was held in Sarajevo during July 2016. My lectures covered the Katz definition of modular forms, a family of forms defined from this perspective and their relation to Eisenstein series, and methods of finding explicit models of modular curves. The treatment is purely expository, and the results are mostly standard, although a few points of view may not be as widely known as they deserve to be.