Appears in collection : Mathematics on the Crossroad of Centuries - A Conference in Honor of Maxim Kontsevich's 60th Birthday

I will discuss a replacement for homotopy cardinality in situations where it is a priori ill-defined, including Z/2-graded dg-categories. A key ingredient are Calabi-Yau structures and their relative generalizations. As an application we obtain a Hall algebra for many pre-triangulated dg-categories for which it was previously undefined. Another application is the proof of a conjecture of Ng-Rutherford-Shende-Sivek expressing the ruling polynomial of a Z/2m-graded Legendrian knot (which is part of the HOMFLY polynomial if m=1) in terms of the homotopy cardinality of its augmentation category. All this is joint work with Mikhail Gorsky.