Macdonald and Schubert polynomials from Markov chains

Series
School of Mathematics Colloquium
Time
Thursday, April 29, 2021 - 11:00am for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87011170680?pwd=ektPOWtkN1U0TW5ETFcrVDNTL1V1QT09
Speaker
Lauren K. Williams – Harvard University – williams@math.harvard.eduhttp://people.math.harvard.edu/~williams/
Organizer
Anton Bernshteyn

Two of the most famous families of polynomials in combinatorics are Macdonald polynomials and Schubert polynomials. Macdonald polynomials are a family of orthogonal symmetric polynomials which generalize Schur and Hall-Littlewood polynomials and are connected to the Hilbert scheme.  Schubert polynomials also generalize Schur polynomials, and represent cohomology classes of Schubert varieties in the flag variety. Meanwhile, the asymmetric exclusion process (ASEP) is a model of particles hopping on a one-dimensional lattice, which was initially introduced by Macdonald-Gibbs-Pipkin to provide a model for translation in protein synthesis.  In my talk I will explain how two different variants of the ASEP have stationary distributions which are closely connected to Macdonald polynomials and Schubert polynomials, respectively.  This leads to new formulas and new conjectures.

This talk is based on joint work with Corteel-Mandelshtam, and joint work with Donghyun Kim.