We present in this paper a differential version of Mirzakhani's recursion relation for the Weil-Petersson volumes of the moduli spaces of bordered Riemann surfaces. We discover that the differential relation, which is equivalent to the original integral formula of Mirzakhani, is a Virasoro constraint condition on a generating function for these volumes. We also show that the generating function for psi and kappa_1 intersections on the moduli space of stable algebraic curves is a 1-parameter solution to the KdV hierarchy. It recovers the Witten-Kontsevich generating function when the parameter is set to be 0.

We give an Eynard-Orantin type topological recursion formula for the canonical Euclidean volume of the combinatorial moduli space of pointed smooth algebraic curves. The recursion comes from the edge removal operation on the space of ribbon graphs. As an application we obtain a new proof of the Kontsevich constants for the ratio of the Euclidean and the symplectic volumes of the moduli space of curves.

We calculate the Laplace transform of the cut-and-join equation of Goulden, Jackson and Vakil. The result is a polynomial equation that has the topological structure identical to the Mirzakhani recursion formula for the Weil-Petersson volume of the moduli space of bordered hyperbolic surfaces. We find that the direct image of this Laplace transformed equation via the inverse of the Lambert W-function is the topological recursion formula for Hurwitz numbers conjectured by Bouchard and Marino using topological string theory.

The Eynard-Orantin recursion formula provides an effective tool for certain enumeration problems in geometry. The formula requires a spectral curve and the recursion kernel. We present a uniform construction of the spectral curve and the recursion kernel from the unstable geometries of the original counting problem. We examine this construction using four concrete examples: Grothendieck's dessins d'enfants (or higher-genus analogue of the Catalan numbers), the intersection numbers of tautological cotangent classes on the moduli stack of stable pointed curves, single Hurwitz numbers, and the stationary Gromov-Witten invariants of the complex projective line.