REPRESENTATION THEORY AND RELATED TOPICS SEMINAR

ABSTRACT: Postnikov defined the totally nonnegative Grassmannian as the part of the Grassmannian where all Plücker coordinates are nonnegative. This space can be described by the combinatorics of planar bipartite graphs in a disk, by affine Bruhat order, and by a host of other combinatorial objects. In this talk, I will recall some of this story, then talk about in progress joint work, together with Chris Fraser and Jacob Matherne, which hopes to extend this combinatorial description to more general partial flag varieties.