Mini-school: "SCHUBERT VARIETIES"

(partially supported by EAGER)



Invited speakers:

Michel Brion (Grenoble)

Anders Skovsted Buch (Aarhus)

Richard Rimanyi (Budapest/Ohio)

Harry Tamvakis (Waltham/Essen)



Place: Banach Center, Warsaw, Poland



Time: 17.05.2003 (arrival day) - 23.05.2003 (departure day)



Organizers: Piotr Pragacz and Andrzej Weber



Scientific Program:

The main goal of the school is to introduce young researchers to different aspects of Schubert varieties. There will be two courses of five 60 minutes lectures each:

Michel Brion: Geometry of flag varieties

Flag varieties are projective algebraic varieties, homogeneous under an action of a linear algebraic group. They are of importance in algebraic geometry and in representation theory. By the Bruhat decomposition, each flag variety is stratified into Schubert cells, isomorphic to affine spaces. Their closures are the Schubert varieties; these may be singular, but admit nice desingularizations.
After presenting classical structure results concerning flag varieties and Schubert varieties, the lectures will discuss some applications to the geometry of subvarieties of flag varieties, and to representation theory.

Harry Tamvakis: Gromov-Witten invariants and quantum cohomology of Grassmannians

The quantum cohomology ring QH^*(X) of a Grassmannian X encodes the enumerative geometry of rational curves in X, in the form of Gromov-Witten invariants. The latter are integers which count the number of rational curves in X of a given degree which are incident to three Schubert varieties in general position. The ring QH^*(X) is a deformation of the usual cohomology ring of X which first appeared in the work of string theorists, and has been studied extensively over the last decade.
The aim of my lectures is to discuss an approach to the 3-point, genus zero Gromov-Witten invariants on Grassmannians which uses only basic algebraic geometry, and to apply this to obtain elementary proofs of the main structure theorems regarding QH^*(X). We will begin with the usual Grassmannian of linear subspaces in complex affine space, and then describe the analogue of this theory for isotropic Grassmannians in the other classical Lie types. Most of these talks are part of a joint project with Andrew Kresch and Anders Buch.


There will be two cycles of three lectures 45 minutes each:

Anders Buch: Combinatorial K-theory

The Grothendieck ring of vector bundles on an algebraic variety provides a "generalization" of the usual cohomology or Chow rings, which gives rise to a more refined intersection theory. I will describe some results which give explicit descriptions of various aspects of this intersection theory. This includes a combinatorial formula for the structure constants which are obtained, when a product of two Schubert structure sheaves on a Grassmann variety is expressed as a linear combination of other Schubert structure sheaves. This formula generalizes the classical Littlewood-Richardson rule, but replaces semistandard Young tableaux with set-valued tableaux. I will also describe a formula for the structure sheaf of a general type of degeneracy locus, which is obtained by putting arbitrary rank conditions on a sequence of vector bundle maps and their compositions. Certain quiver coefficients associated with this formula are conjectured to have signs which alternate with codimension. This alternation of signs is part of a general K-theory phenomenon, which for example also occurs in the above mentioned Littlewood-Richardson rule. If time allows I will discuss a recent proof, with Kresch, Tamvakis, and Yong, of a special case of this conjecture.

Richard Rimanyi: Interpolation approach to Schubert and quiver polynomials

We will study numerous geometrically relevant polynomials in a unified language, the language of "Thom polynomials for group actions". We will focus on the special cases of double Schubert polynomials and the polynomials representing quiver cycles (see [Buch-Fulton]). We will apply the general (interpolation) theory of Thom polynomials to these cases, concluding in a formula for the quiver classes in terms of Schubert polynomials (see also [Knutson-Miller]). The results presented are a joint work with L. Feher. The talks will be essentially self-contained, with many examples.
Lecture 1: classifying spaces, characteristic classes; Thom polynomials for group actions. Lecture 2: double Schubert polynomials as Thom polynomials. Lecture 3: Thom polynomials for quivers.


Additional lectures will be selected from the participants' proposals.


Schedule

Practical information

Registration form

See the possibilities of accommodation. Please return the form to organizers.

For more information please contact: pragacz@impan.gov.pl or aweber@mimuw.edu.pl

Participants:


Katrin Appel (Wuppertal), Michel Brion (Grenoble), Anders Skovsted Buch (Aarhus), Slawomir Cynk (Krakow), Swiatoslaw Gal (Wroclaw), Tomasz Elsner (Wroclaw), Laszlo Feher (Budapest), Grzegorz Kapustka (Krakow), Michal Kapustka (Krakow), Martijn Grooten (Nijmegen), Gert Moustad Hana (Bergen), Zbigniew Jelonek (Krakow), Christian Meyer (Mainz), Mikkel Oebro (Aarhus), Damian Osajda (Wroclaw), Piotr Pragacz (Warszawa), Slawomir Rams (Krakow), Erik Reuvers (Nijmegen), Richard Rimanyi (Budapest/Ohio), Andrzej Szczepanski (Gdansk), Marek Szyjewski (Katowice), Harry Tamvakis (Waltham/Essen), Alexis Tchoudjem (Grenoble), Dimitri Timashev (Moscow/Grenoble), Francisco Leon Trujillo (Roma), Andrzej Weber (Warszawa),
and Warsaw Mathematicians.


Accommodation:

There are two possibilities:
1. Accomodation at the Institute: price 120 zl=30 euro per night
2. Accomodation at the University Hotel which is in 40 minutes walk distance or 15 min by bus: price 71 zl=18 euro per night


The participants from EU and associated countries may apply to their home nodes of EAGER network for financial support.