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K-State Today

October 16, 2012

Mathematics speaker to talk today

Submitted by Reta McDermott

Calin Chindris from the University of Missouri, Columbia, will speak on Littlewood-Richardson coefficients and quivers at 2:30 p.m. today in 122 Cardwell Hall.

The Littlewood-Richardson coefficients are fundamental structure constants that appear in many areas of mathematics including representation theory, invariant theory and algebraic combinatorics.

Motivated by physical considerations, Andrei Okounkov, Moscow State University, conjectured that the Littlewood-Richardson coefficients satisfy a certain log-concavity property. In joint work with Harm Derksen, University of Michigan, and Jerzy Weyman, Northeastern University, Chindris approached Okounkov’s log-concavity conjecture from the point of view of the invariant theory of quivers.

In this talk, Chindris will explain Okounkov’s conjecture within the general framework of quiver invariant theory, and then Chindris will classify those quivers for which all weight spaces of semi-invariants are log-concave. Chindris will also present explicit examples of non-log-concave Littlewood-Richardson coefficients.