Sara Billey: Recent Advances in Symmetric Functions and Tableaux Combinatorics.

Current Topics Seminar

Speaker	Sara Billey
Title	Recent Advances in Symmetric Functions and Tableaux Combinatorics.
Date	March 1, 4:00pm PDL C-36

In this talk, we will introduce an exciting new area of algebraic combinatorics related to symmetric functions. One of the most important families of symmetric functions are Schur functions. They arise in natural ways in representation theory, algebraic geometry, physics, and economics. In the 1990's there was a generalization of Schur functions, called k-Schur functions, which have been described in 4 different ways, but these 4 ways are only conjectured to be equivalent. We will introduce one definition of the k-Schur functions which are based on tableaux and discuss some of their known and conjectured properties.