Colóquio de Matemática

Supercharacters: behind and beyond

Sala 6.2.33, Ciências ULisboa (com transmissão via Zoom)

Por Carlos André (Departamento de Matemática | Ciências ULisboa e CEAFEL-Ciências - Centro de Análise Funcional, Estruturas Lineares e Aplicações).

Describing the conjugacy classes or irreducible characters of the unipotent upper triangular group over a finite field is known to be an impossibly difficult problem. Superclasses and supercharacters have been introduced (under the names of "basic varieties" and "basic characters") as an attempt to approximate conjugacy classes and irreducible characters using a cruder version of Kirillov's method of coadjoint orbits. In the past thirty years, these notions have been recognised in several areas (seemingly unrelated to representation theory): exponential sums in number theory, random walks in probability and statistics, association schemes in algebraic combinatorics... In this talk, we will summarise and illustrate the main ideas, applications, and recent developments, not only in the finite group case, but also in the more general setting of super-representation theories of unipotent groups defined over locally compact topological fields.


Transmissão via Zoom.

16h00
Departamento de Matemática | Ciências ULisboa