Previous Special Year Seminar

Configuration spaces of points in graphs are nonsmooth analogs of braid arrangements, appearing in robotics applications and in theory of moduli spaces of tropical curves. While their cohomology is extremely difficult to understand, and depends on...

Suppose given a class of finite combinatorial structures, such as graphs or total orders. Nate Harman and I recently introduced a notion of measure in this context: this is a rule assigning a number to each structure such that some axioms are...

The Kadomtsev-Petviashvili (KP) Equation has deep connections to algebraic curves, with solutions constructed from Riemann theta functions in the style of Krichever. As a curve undergoes tropical degeneration, its theta function simplifies to a...

Given a triple (X,π,s) consisting of a homogeneous space X=G/P, a dominant weight π giving a projective embedding of X, and a reduced expression s for the minimal coset representative of w_0 in the parabolic quotient W/W_P, we construct a polytope...

We will discuss combinatorial and algebraic aspects of regular Hessenberg varieties, a large class of subvarieties of the flag variety G/B. For the special case of Peterson varieties, we show their equivariant structure constants are non-negative...

A real plane algebraic curve C is called expressive if its defining polynomial has the smallest number of critical points allowed by the topology of the set of real points of C. We give a necessary and sufficient criterion for expressivity (subject...

We present a combinatorial approach to the Deligne-Mumford-Knudsen compactification of the moduli space of n distinct points on the projective line $P^1$. The idea is to choose a totally symmetric embedding of the orbits of generic points into a...

We show that various classical theorems of linear incidence geometry, such as the theorems of Pappus, Desargues, Möbius, and so on, can be interpreted as special cases of a general result that involves a tiling of a closed oriented surface by...

Abstract: In this talk I will construct a “quasisymmetric flag variety”, a subvariety of the complete type A  flag variety built by adapting the BGG geometric construction of divided differences to the newly introduced “quasisymmetric divided...

Postnikov's divided symmetrization, introduced in the context of volume polynomials of permutahedra, possesses a host of remarkable ``positivity'' properties. These turn out to be best understood using a family of operators we call quasisymmetric...