Carl Mautner (University of California - Riverside)

Math & Stats Department Colloquium

Friday, October 27th, 2023

Time: 2:30 p.m.  Place: Jeffery Hall, Room 234

Speaker: Carl Mautner (University of California - Riverside)

Title: Symmetric groups, Schur algebras and Hilbert schemes

Abstract: In his 1901 thesis, Issai Schur discovered a connection between the representation theory of the symmetric group and general linear group. One way to understand this connection is through a finite dimensional algebra called the Schur algebra. I will outline this picture and then describe a new algebra, defined in joint work with Tom Braden, and some of its nice properties. Finally, I will explain how we came to discover this algebra by studying the geometry of the Hilbert scheme of points in the plane.

Bio: Prof. Carl Mautner is an associate professor at UC Riverside. He received his PhD from the University of Texas, Austin in 2010. He was then a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and the Max Planck Institut in Bonn, before joining the faculty at UC Riverside in 2015. He also held a visiting position at Dartmouth. Prof. Mautner’s work is in geometric representation theory, a field at the intersection of algebra, topology, algebraic geometry and combinatorics. When not doing math, Prof. Mautner sometimes sparks, knowingly or not, wildflower superblooms in his backyard.