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CAGE: Philadelphia Area Combinatorics and Alg. Geometry Seminar

Thursday, January 18, 2018 - 3:00pm

Andy Wilson

Penn

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL 3C6

The coinvariant ring of the symmetric group is the quotient of the polynomial ring by the ideal generated by all symmetric polynomials without a constant term. Many properties of this ring are closely connected to the combinatorics of the symmetric group. What if, instead, we mod out by an ideal generated by some other set of polynomials? If the ideal is symmetric, can we use combinatorics to understand the properties of the resulting quotient ring? A variety of authors (Rhoades, Haglund, Shimozono, Huang, Scrimshaw, the speaker, and others) have discovered many well-behaved quotient rings this way. Furthermore, they have shown that the rings are connected to classical combinatorial objects like ordered set partitions and words. We will provide an overview of the work in this area and pose a conjecture that, if proven, would unify much of the existing work on this problem.