I’ve written a lot about Schubert calculus here over the last few years, in posts such as Schubert Calculus, What do Schubert Curves, Young tableaux, and K-theory have in common? (Part II) and (Part III), and Shifted partitions and the Orthogonal Grassmannian.

I soon found out that writing a lot about your favorite topics on a blog can sometimes get you invited to give talks on said topics. This past June, I gave one of the three graduate mini-courses at the Equivariant Combinatorics workshop at the Center for Mathematics Research (CRM) in Montreal.

Naturally, a lot of what I covered came from the blog posts I already had written, but I also prepared more material on flag varieties and Schubert polynomials, more details on the cohomology of the Grassmannian, and more problems and examples suitable for the workshop. So I organized all of this material into a single lecture notes document available here:

Variations on a Theme of Schubert Calculus

The coolest part was that the CRM had good quality audio/video setup for all three workshops, and so you can also view my lecture videos that accompany these notes at the following five links, and take the entire course yourself:

Lecture 1: Introduction, Projective varieties, Schubert cells in the Grassmannian

Lecture 2: Duality theorem, CW complexes, Homology/cohomology

Lecture 3: Littlewood-Richardson rule, Flag variety, Schubert polynomials

Lecture 4: Cohomology of flag variety, generalized flag varieties

Lecture 5: The orthogonal Grassmannian, recap

You can also find the videos for the other two mini-courses from the summer – Steven Griffeth’s lectures on Cherednik algebras and Jeffrey Remmel’s lectures on symmetric function theory – at this link.

Hope someone out there finds these lectures useful or interesting. I certainly had a blast teaching the course!