Reading Seminar in Geometric Representation Theory

This Winter quarter at Northwestern I'm organising a reading seminar in geometric representation theory. Our goal is to read and discuss some classic and important papers in geometric representation theory from the last forty years. Each week we'll choose a paper to cover; all participants will read it, and one person will prepare a talk explaining the main ideas (but discussion will be very welcome!)

We'll meet once a week, on Tuesdays from 4pm in Lunt 103. We have the room until 6pm, so talks will be up to two hours long.

I've prepared a list of possible papers with summaries, however I'm very welcome to have people cover papers that aren't on the list if they have other suggestions.

Schedule and Notes

January 10th: Beilinson-Bernstein: Localisation de g-modules (Aron) - Notes
January 14th: Borho-Macpherson: Partial Resolutions of Nilpotent Varieties (Chris) - Notes
January 21st: Bernstein-Gelfand-Gelfand: Differential Operators on the Base Affine Space and a Study of g-modules (Phil)
January 28th: Kirillov: Unitary Representation of Nilpotent Lie Groups (Rebecca)
February 4th: Mirkovic-Vilonen: Geometric Langlands Duality and Representations of Algebraic Groups over Commutative Rings (Aron)
February 11th: Beauville-Laszlo: Conformal Blocks and Generalized Theta Functions (Chris) - Notes
February 18th: No meeting
February 25th: Gaitsgory-Rozenblyum: Crystals and D-modules (Brian)
March 4th: Beilinson-Ginzburg-Soergel: Koszul Duality Patterns in Representation Theory (Phil)

Participants

Chris Elliott, Elden Elmato, Honghao Gao, Cassandra Hall, Aron Heleodoro, Ben Knudsen, Clemens Koppensteiner, Guchuan Li, Dylan Moreland, Bif Reiser, Nan Shi, Joel Specter, Paul VanKoughnett, Rebecca Wei, Brian Williams, Phil-Sang Yoo