Colloquium
Speaker : Aram Bingham
Day/Date/Time: 4:00 pm, Wednesday, 5th February
Venue : Ramanujan Hall
Title: Kronecker coefficients, polytopes, and complexity
Abstract : The “Kronecker coefficients problem” is one of the last major open questions in the classical representation theory of symmetric groups. It asks for a combinatorial rule describing the decomposition of tensor products of irreducible symmetric group representations, and a solution is known only in limited special cases. Kronecker coefficients have also
been the subject of much recent research motivated by the geometric complexity theory (GCT) program of Mulmuley and Sohoni, who hypothesized efficient computation of these numbers as part of a strategy to separate the computational complexity classes P and NP. We will discuss some of the main representation theoretic questions related to GCT and report some progress on computing Kronecker coefficients via discrete volumes of polytopes (joint work with Ernesto Vallejo).