Topological Hyperbolicity of Moduli spaces of Elliptic Surfaces

We introduce the notion of topological hyperbolicity to characterize the largeness of the topological fundamental group of a complex variety. Inspired by the Shafarevich conjecture, we propose to study the topological hyperbolicity of moduli spaces of polarized manifolds. We provide two pieces of supporting evidence: first, we show that moduli spaces where the infinitesimal Torelli theorem holds are very close to being topologically hyperbolic. Second, we establish a weak form of topological hyperbolicity for moduli spaces of elliptic surfaces of Kodaira dimension one without multiple fibers, where the infinitesimal Torelli theorem generally does not hold.