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On Schubert’s Problem of Characteristics

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Schubert Calculus and Its Applications in Combinatorics and Representation Theory (ICTSC 2017)

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Abstract

The Schubert varieties on a flag manifold G/P give rise to a cell decomposition on G/P whose Kronecker duals, known as the Schubert classes on G/P, form an additive base of the integral cohomology \(H^{*}(G/P)\). The Schubert’s problem of characteristics asks to express a monomial in the Schubert classes as a linear combination in the Schubert basis. We present a unified formula expressing the characteristics of a flag manifold G/P as polynomials in the Cartan numbers of the group G. As application we develop a direct approach to our recent works on the Schubert presentation of the cohomology rings of flag manifolds G/P.

The authors are supported by NSFC 11131008, 11431009 and 11661131004.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This English translation of the profound discovery of van der Waerden in German [59] is due to Schappacher [56].

  2. 2.

    The enumerative results in Schubert [51] were mutually verifiable with the results of other geometers (e.g. Salmon, Clebsch, Chasles and Zeuthen) of the same period, hence were already known to be correct at that time.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank their referees for valuable suggestions and improvements on the earlier version of the paper.

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Correspondence to Haibao Duan .

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Duan, H., Zhao, X. (2020). On Schubert’s Problem of Characteristics. In: Hu, J., Li, C., Mihalcea, L.C. (eds) Schubert Calculus and Its Applications in Combinatorics and Representation Theory. ICTSC 2017. Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics, vol 332. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7451-1_4

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