Abstract

We briefly review the origin in physics of attractor points on the moduli space of Calabi-Yau threefolds. We turn to their mathematical interpretation as special cases of Hodge loci. This leads to fascinating conjectures on the modularity of the Calabi-Yau threefolds at these points in terms of their periods and L-functions. For hypergeometric one-parameter families of Calabi-Yau threefolds, these conjectures can be verified at least numerically to very high precision.