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Evidence for parking conjectures

Algebra & Discrete Mathematics

Speaker: Brendon Rhoades, UC San Diego
Related Webpage: http://www.math.ucsd.edu/~bprhoades/
Location: 1147 MSB
Start time: Fri, Dec 4 2015, 2:10PM

The noncrossing set partitions of {1, 2, ... , n} are famously counted by the Catalan number . For any reflection group , one can associate a `-Catalan number' Cat() and prove that it counts a -analog of noncrossing partitions. Unfortunately, the only known proofs of this fact use the Cartan-Killing classification of reflection groups. In joint work with Armstrong and Reiner, I defined a new class of objects attached to called `-noncrossing parking functions' and made a conjecture about them which uniformly implies the -Catalan enumeration. I will explain this conjecture and give some recent evidence for it, including its proof in the (surprisingly) most challenging classical case -- that of the symmetric group.