Previous Special Year Seminar

Jan
23
2025

Special Year Seminar II

Introduction to Equivariant Cohomology (continued)
10:00am|Simonyi 101

Equivariant cohomology was introduced in the 1960s by Borel, and has been studied by many mathematicians since that time.  The talks will be an introduction to some of this work.  We will focus on torus-equivariant cohomology (as well as Borel-Moore...

Jan
22
2025

Special Year Seminar I

Introduction to Equivariant Cohomology
2:00pm|Simonyi 101

Equivariant cohomology was introduced in the 1960s by Borel, and has been studied by many mathematicians since that time.  The talks will be an introduction to some of this work.  We will focus on torus-equivariant cohomology (as well as Borel-Moore...

Jan
16
2025

Special Year Seminar II

Topological Bound for Tropical Varieties
11:00am|Wolfensohn Hall

The construction by Mikhalkin of a non-planar tropical cubic curve in R^3 of genus 1 marked a significant breakthrough in the study of combinatorial tropical varieties. It was the first known example of a non-realizable tropical variety, with the...

Jan
16
2025

Special Year Seminar II

Beyond the g-conjecture
10:00am|Wolfensohn Hall

The conjecture in combinatorics that has received perhaps the most attention over the last 50 years is McMullen's g-conjecture. It provides a complete characterisation of the number of $i$-dimensional faces in a triangulation of an $(d - 1)$...

Dec
19
2024

Special Year Seminar II

Chow Functions for Partially Ordered Sets
10:00am|Simonyi 101

In a landmark paper in 1992, Stanley developed the foundations of what is now known as the Kazhdan--Lusztig--Stanley (KLS) theory. To each kernel in a graded poset, he associates special functions called KLS polynomials. This unifies and puts a...

Dec
18
2024

Special Year Seminar I

Singular Points on Positroid Varieties and Physics Applications
Joseph Fluegemann
2:00pm|Simonyi 101

We heard last week in Daoji's talk about positroid varieties, which are subvarieties in the Grassmannian defined by cyclic rank conditions, and which are related to Schubert varieties. In this talk, we will provide a criterion for whether positroid...

Dec
12
2024

Special Year Seminar II

Kahler Packages on Valuations on Convex Sets and Their Applications
Semyon Alesker
10:00am|Simonyi 101

A valuation is a finitely additive measure on the class of all convex compact subsets of $R^n$. Over the past two decades, a number of structures has been discovered on the space of translation invariant smooth valuations. Recently, these findings...

Dec
11
2024

Special Year Seminar I

Standard Monomials for Positroid Varieties
2:00pm|Simonyi 101

Influential work of Hodge from the 1940s led the way in using Gröbner bases to combinatorially study the Grassmannian. We follow Hodge's approach to investigate certain subvarieties of the Grassmannian, called positroid varieties. Positroid...

Dec
09
2024

Special Year Seminar

Tits's Dream: Buildings Over F1 and Combinatorial Flag Varieties
2:30pm|Rubenstein Commons | Meeting Room 5

The theme of the lecture is the notion of points over F1, the field with one element. Several heuristic computations led to certain expectations on the set of F1-points: for example the Euler characteristic of a smooth projective complex variety X...

Dec
05
2024

Special Year Seminar II

Cotangent Schubert Calculus
10:00am|Simonyi 101

Schubert Calculus studies cohomology rings in (generalized) flag varieties, equipped with a distinguished basis - the fundamental classes of Schubert varieties - with structure constants satisfying many desirable properties. Cotangent Schubert...