Geometry Working Seminar

Andrew Staal, Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo

"Reducibility of Varieties of Commuting Matrices"

We will present some well-known results on reducibility of the varieties C(k,n) of commuting k-tuples of nxn-matrices.  In particular, we will discuss the Motzkin—Taussky Theorem proving irreducibility of C(2,n) and Guralnick’s Theorem, which shows that C(3,n) is reducible when n ≥ 29.  

MC 5413