Supercharacters and combinatorial Hopf algebras

May 17 to May 21, 2010

at the

American Institute of Mathematics, Palo Alto, California

organized by

Nantel Bergeron, Persi Diaconis, Jean-Yves Thibon, and Nathaniel Thiem

This workshop, sponsored by AIM and the NSF, will bring together experts in the emerging area of supercharacter theory and experts in Hopf algebras. Super characters/classes are certain unions of irreducible characters/conjugacy classes which fit together to give a rich, new combinatorial structure that allows analysis for previously intractable problems such as the the group of upper triangular matrices with coefficients in a finite field Hopf algebras have given a useful framework for studying the representation theory of towers of algebras, following the classical relationship between the representation theory of the symmetric group and the ring of symmetric functions. Recent work has suggested that similar noncommutative Hopf algebraic structures might exist for super-representation theories. In particular, this workshop will investigate the case of finite groups of unipotent upper-triangular matrices.

The workshop will differ from typical conferences in some regards. Participants will be invited to suggest open problems and questions before the workshop begins, and these will be posted on the workshop website. These include specific problems on which there is hope of making some progress during the workshop, as well as more ambitious problems which may influence the future activity of the field. Lectures at the workshop will be focused on familiarizing the participants with the background material leading up to specific problems, and the schedule will include discussion and parallel working sessions.

The deadline to apply for support to participate in this workshop has passed.

For more information email workshops@aimath.org


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