Abstract. We give an explicit conjectural formula for the motivic Euler characteristic of an arbitrary symplectic local system on the moduli space A3 of principally polarized abelian threefolds. The main term of the formula is a conjectural motive of Siegel modular forms of a certain type; the remaining terms admit a surprisingly simple description in terms of the motivic Euler characteristics for lower genera. The conjecture is based on extensive counts of curves of genus three and abelian threefolds over finite fields. It provides a lot of new information about vector-valued Siegel modular forms of degree three, such as dimension formulas and traces of Hecke operators. We also use it to predict several lifts from genus 1 to genus 3, as well as lifts from G2 and new congruences of Harder type.

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These tables record results on curves with many points over finite fields. For relatively small genus (0 ≤ g ≤ 50) and q a small power of 2 or 3 we give in two tables the best presently known bounds for Nq(g), the maximum number of rational points on a smooth absolutely irreducible projective curve of genus g over a field Fq of cardinality q. In additional tables we list for a given pair (g, q) the type of construction of the best curve so far, and we give a reference to the literature where such a curve can be found.

We introduce a stratification on the space of symplectic flags on the de Rham bundle of the universal principally polarized abelian variety in positive characteristic and study its geometric properties like irreducibility of the strata and we calculate the cycle classes. When the characteristic p is treated as a formal variable these classes can be seen as a deformation of the classes of the Schubert varieties for the corresponding classical flag variety (the classical case is recovered by putting p equal to 0). We relate our stratification with the E-O stratification on the moduli space of principally polarized abelian varieties of a fixed dimension and derive properties of the latter. Our results are strongly linked with the combinatorics of the Weyl group of the symplectic group.