Topology Atlas | Conferences


Knots in Washington XLVIII
May 10-12, 2019
George Washington University
Washington, DC, United States

Organizers
Valentina Harizanov (GWU), Jozef H. Przytycki (GWU), Yongwu Rong (GWU), Radmila Sazdanovic (NCSU), Alexander Shumakovitch (GWU)

Conference Homepage


Counting factorizations in complex reflection groups
by
Joel Brewster Lewis
GWU
Coauthors: Alejandro Morales

In this talk, I'll discuss ongoing work with Alejandro Morales generalizing a 30-year old result of Jackson on permutation enumeration: we consider the enumeration of arbitrary factorizations of a Coxeter element in a well generated finite complex reflection group, keeping track of the fixed space dimension of the factors. As in the case of the symmetric group, the factorization counts are ugly, so the goal is to choose a basis for the generating function in which the answer is nice. In the case of the infinite families of monomial matrices, we accomplish this via combinatorial arguments; a notion of transitivity of a factorization appears for the "type D" group G(m, m, n). I'll also describe some puzzling partial results in the exceptional cases, and a tentative connection with maps on surfaces.

Date received: May 9, 2019


Copyright © 2019 by the author(s). The author(s) of this work and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Topology Atlas. Document # cbpy-11.