Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

Return to Colloquia & Seminar listing

Crystals are colored directed graphs that encode representation theoretic information. Their construction is inherently global in nature, but locally they tend to be very self-similar. In 2002, John Stembridge characterized crystals for simply-laced algebras using local criteria. In this talk we will learn what crystals are, why they are important, and what Stembridge's result says. We will also see an in-progress generalization of this result to doubly-laced types.