## Spring 2016 Seminars and Abstracts Spring 2016 Seminars and Abstracts

Seminars take place on Monday afternoons 14:00 - 15:00. Everyone is welcome.

### Talks

• October 10, (SCI 3.05), Chris Le Sueur (UEA), Infinite Games: Infintie Fun!
• October 17, (SCI 3.05), James East (University of Western Sydney), Idempotents in Planar Diagram Monoids.
• October 24, (SCI 0.31), Dr Lorna Gregory (Manchester), Interpretation Functors, Representation Type and Decidability.
• November 7, (C.HALL 01.19) Wolfram Bentz (Hull), The Rank of Partition-Stabilising Monoids of Transformations.
• November 14, (ARTS 2.02),  Alex Zalesski (UEA), Invariants of Maximal Tori and Individual Elements of Chevalley Groups in Their Representations.
• November 21, (SCI 3.05),  Shaun Stevens (UEA), Propagating results in complex representation theory via the modular theory.
• November 28, (LT4),  Beth Romano (Cambridge), Representations of p-adic groups via geometric invariant theory.
• December 5, (LT4), Johannes Siemons (UEA), On the shape of permutations in a finite primitive permutation group.
• December 12, Starting at 15:00, (SCI 3.05), Professor Shahn Majid (QMUL), Hodge operator on quantum groups and braided Fourier transform.

### Abstracts

Chris Le Sueur: Infinite games arose out of the study of game theory in the 50s and grew into the field of Determinacy in Set Theory, where it is now one of the most important topics. I will give a "suitable for non-set-theorists" introduction to the area, culminating in a taste of the connections with large cardinals. I'll try to assume as little prior knowledge as possible, though if you can remember what ordinals and cardinals are, that will help!

James East: I will discuss recent joint projects with Igor Dolinka, Des FitzGerald, Robert Gray, James Mitchell, and others, on planar diagram monoids.  These include families such as Temperley-Lieb monoids, Kauffman monoids and Motzkin monoids.  Questions considered include:  What are the idempotents of these monoids?  How many idempotents are there?  What is the idempotent-generated submonoid?  What it the minimal number of idempotents required to generate these submonoids?

Lorna Gregory: In this talk I will give an overview of recent developments in the model theory of representations of finite-dimensional k-algebras.
These results will connect the representation type of a finite-dimensional algebra with the decidability of its theory of modules.
The theory of modules of a ring R is said to be decidable if there exists an algorithm which given a first order sentence in the language R-modules answers whether this sentence is true of all R-modules or not.
In order investigate the relationship between the representation type of a finite-dimensional algebra with the decidability of its theories of modules, we use interpretation functors which are an additive version of the model theoretic notion of interpretation. Algebraically, they are characterised as additive functors between module categories which commute with direct limits and products.
The representation type of a finite-dimensional k-algebra is a measure of how hard it is to classify its finite-dimensional indecomposable modules. Roughly, a finite-dimensional k-algebra is of wild representation type if classifying its finite-dimensional indecomposable modules is as hard as classifying those of the polynomial ring in two non-commuting variables. On the other hand, a finite-dimensional algebra is tame if for every dimension d, all but finitely many of the finite-dimensional indecomposable modules of dimension d are in finitely many 1-parameter families. According to Drozd, when k is algebraically closed, a finite-dimensional k-algebra is either tame or wild.
All terminology coming from model theory will be explained, as will the definitions of tame and wild representation type.

Wolfram Bentz: Let $\mathcal{P}$ be a partition of a finite set $X$. We say that a transformation $f:X\to X$ stabilises the partition $\mathcal{P}$ if for all $P\in \mathcal{P}$ there exists $Q\in \mathcal{P}$ such that $Pf\subseteq Q$. Let  $T(X,\mathcal{P})$ denote the monoid of all full transformations of $X$ that preserve the partition $\mathcal{P}$.
In 2005 Pei Huisheng found an upper bound for the minimum size of the generating sets of $T(X,\mathcal{P})$, when  $\mathcal{P}$ is a partition in which all of its parts have the same size. In addition, he conjectured that his bound was exact. In 2009, Ara\’ujo and Schneider used representation theory to confirm this conjecture.
A more general task is to find the minimum size of the generating sets of $T(X,\mathcal{P})$, when  $\mathcal{P}$ is an arbitrary partition. In this talk we presents the solution of this problem and discuss some of the proof techniques, which range from representation theory to combinatorial arguments

Alex Zalesski: I shall concenrate on the group SLn(q). Let T be a maximal abelian irreducible subgroup of G. This is known to be cyclic, so let T = ⟨t⟩. One of problems of interest is to determine the eigenvalue 1 multiplicities of t in irreducible representations of G, or at least to decide when this is non-zero. The problem nature depends on the characteristic p of the representation field. I shall report some new results for p = 0 and for p dividing q.

Shaun Stevens: The Jacquet—Langlands correspondence is a bijection between so-called “discrete series” irreducible complex representations of two p-adic groups. Among these discrete series representations, the basic ones, which are building blocks, are called “cuspidal”. To a certain extent, the Jacquet—Langlands can be described explicitly when two cuspidal representations correspond. I will try to explain what these words mean and how techniques from modular representation theory can be used in a surprising way to extend these results to arbitrary discrete series representations, even though the representations we are interested in are all complex! This is joint work with Vincent Sécherre.

Beth Romano: The structure of reductive p-adic groups arises from the interaction of Euclidean geometry and the arithmetic of p-adic fields. In recent work Reeder and Yu draw upon this interaction to construct “epipelagic” supercuspidal representations. A p-adic group G is associated to a tiling of a certain affine space A. Each point x in A determines a group G_x and an F_p-representation V_x of G_x. Given a stable linear functional on V_x, the recipe of Reeder–Yu produces a finite set of supercuspidal representations. For small p, these would be new representations of G which are especially interesting for the local Langlands correspondence. In joint work, Jessica Fintzen and I have classified those points x in A such that V_x has stable linear functionals; as a corollary the construction of Reeder–Yu gives new representations when p is small. In my talk, I will give an overview of this work, as well as explicit examples for the case when G = G_2, the automorphism group of the octonions. For these examples, I will explicitly describe the locus of all stable vectors, as well as the Langlands parameters which correspond under the local Langlands correspondence to the representations of G.

Johannes Siemons: Let G be a permutation group on a finite set X, and let g be an element in G. Now write g as a product of distinct cycles and denote the length of these cycles by n_1, n_2,..,n_t.  We may think of this information as the shape of g. It contains essential information about g, and even about G itself. For instance, if  g has order k, one may conclude - naively - that one of the cycles of g has length k. Of course, this is not true, the permutation (1,2,3)(4,5) has order 6.
Nevertheless, and this should surprise you, under the right additional assumption the naive conclusion does hold true: For all but two types of finite primitive permutation groups G each element g in G has a cycle whose length is the order of g. This is work of P Spiga, C Praeger, M Giudici, L Emmett, A Zalesskii and myself, some of it going back to 2002 but with renewed interest and new results by the first three authors.
A large part of the talk will be elementary. I will explain why elements with long cycles are interesting, what primitive means  and what types of primitive groups there are. There are still open conjectures, and we give some ideas about proofs. Finally we mention consequences for recognition problems for finite simple groups.