Over the past few years the understanding of the microscopic theory of black hole entropy has made important conceptual progress by recognizing that the degeneracies are encoded in partition functions which are determined by higher rank automorphic representations, in particular in the context of Siegel modular forms of genus two. In this review, some of the elements of this framework are highlighted. One of the surprising aspects is that the Siegel forms that have appeared in the entropic context are geometric in origin, arising from weight two cusp forms, hence from elliptic curves.
BPS black hole degeneracies and minimal automorphic representations
