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Colloquium November 21

Date: Friday November 21

Time: 16:00 to 17:00

Place: 455 McBryde (Commons Room)

Speaker: Gail Letzter of the Math Dept

Title: q Special Functions and Quantum Symmetric Spaces

Abstract

Zonal spherical functions on symmetric spaces are eigenfunctions with respect to certain differential operators. For example, given a real number s, the function

  f(x) = exp(sx)

on the reals can be viewed as an eigenfunction with eigenvalue s with respect to the differential operator d/dx. A beautiful classical result asserts that the zonal spherical functions associated to compact symmetric spaces of rank n can be identified with a family of orthogonal polynomials where the underlying variables are the functions

  fi(x1,...,xn) = exp(xi)  for i=1,2,...,n.

We discuss q versions of this result using the theory of quantum groups and q special functions.


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