Department of Mathematics Colloquium

Speaker

Angele Hamel (Dept. Math., WLU)

Title

Schur functions and Tokuyama's Identity

Abstract

In 1988, Tokuyama discovered a remarkable identity that expresses a certain combinatorial sum as the product of a t-deformed Vandermonde determinant and Schur symmetric function. His identity is a modern twist on Weyl's character formula — a well-known classical algebraic identity introduced by Hermann Weyl in the 1920s. The algebraic and combinatorial proofs of Tokuyama's identity involve symmetric functions, tableaux, Gelfand-Tsetlin patterns, and determinants, and they reveal much about the structure of these objects. In this talk I will present an introduction to this identity along with some recent combinatorial results for symplectic characters and for factorial Schur functions.

Time: 4 p.m. – 4:50 p.m.
Day: Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2019
Location: LH3060