Colloquium: Pamela Harris (Williams)

When:
February 1, 2019 @ 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm
2019-02-01T15:30:00-10:00
2019-02-01T16:30:00-10:00
Where:
Keller 401

Speaker: Pamela Harris (Williams College)

Title: Kostant’s partition function

Abstract: In this talk we introduce Kostant’s partition function which counts the number of ways to represent a particular weight (vector) as a nonnegative integral sum of positive roots of a Lie algebra (a finite set of vectors). We provide two fundamental uses for this function. The first is associated with the computation of weight multiplicities in finite-dimensional irreducible representations of classical Lie algebras and the second is in the computation of volumes of flow polytopes. We provide some recent results in the representation theory setting and state a direction of ongoing research related to the computation of the volume of a new flow polytope associated to a Caracol diagram.