Special Year Seminar

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...

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...

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 P1. The idea is to choose a totally symmetric embedding of the orbits of generic points into a high...

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...

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 differences”...

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...

The ring of symmetric functions has a linear basis of Schur functions sλ indexed by partitions λ=(λ1≥λ2≥…≥0). Littlewood-Richardson coefficients cνλ,μ are the structure constants of such a basis.

A function is Schur nonnegative if it is a linear...

A remarkable result of Brändén and Huh tells us that volume polynomials of projective varieties are Lorentzian polynomials. The dual notion of covolume polynomials was introduced by Aluffi by considering the cohomology classes of subvarieties of a...

K-theory arose in the 1950s from Grothendieck’s formulation of the Riemann-Roch theorem – that is, from attempts to calculate spaces of sections of vector bundles on a variety X via intersection theory on X.  An equivariant version was introduced...