Frontiers of reality in the Schubert Calculus
Frank Sottile,   Texas A&M University
Friday, 21 September, Sam Houston State University
    About 12 years ago, Boris Shapiro and Michael Shapiro made a remarkable conjecture about real solutions to geometric problems coming from the classical Schubert calculus on a Grassmannian. The conjecture was proven recently by Mukhin, Tarasov, and Varchenko, using a deep connection between integral systems and Schubert calculus. This was popularized through extensive computational evidence, and these computational experiments led to a subtle extension of it to flag manifolds. A special case of this generalization was proven by Eremenko and others, and their work suggests a generalization of the original Shapiro conjecture. A feature of this story is an interesting dialog between theory and experiment.
    In my talk, I will introduce the Shapiro conjecture and some of its extensions. In particular, I will describe the large-scale experiments we have run to formulate these extensions and the convincing evidence found. This is joint work with Luis Garcia, and our research team at Texas A&M University.