Solving Schubert Problems with Littlewood-Richardson Homotopies

Abstract:

We present a new numerical homotopy continuation algorithm for finding all solutions to Schubert problems on Grassmannians. This Littlewood-Richardson homotopy is based on Vakil's geometric proof of the Littlewood-Richardson rule. Its start solutions are given by linear equations and they are tracked through a sequence of homotopies encoded by certain checker configurations to find the solutions to a given Schubert problem. For generic Schubert problems the number of paths tracked is optimal. The Littlewood-Richardson homotopy algorithm is implemented using the path trackers of the software package PHCpack.

This is work with Frank Sottile and Ravi Vakil.

ISSAC 2010, T.U. Munich, Germany, 25-28 July, 2010.

slides of the talk