Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

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Description

While the pfaffian of an alternating (~~skew-symmetric) matrix can be thought of as simply the square root of its determinant, it can be interesting and fruitful to consider pfaffians in their own right. I'll discuss a couple of ways in which pfaffians arise naturally (random matrices and orthogonal grassmannians), both of which lead to the following question: What are the identities satisfied by the (pfaffian) minors of an alternating matrix?