School of Mathematics Colloquium

Pfaffian representations of quintics

by Prof. Mohan Kumar (Washington University, USA)

Thursday, May 10, 2012 from to (Asia/Kolkata)
at Colaba Campus ( AG-69 )
Description
It is known that a general quintic (homogeneous form of degree
five) in five variables can be expressed as the Pfaffian of a
skew-symmetric matrix in only finitely many ways upto equivalence. I will
discuss attempts at finding this number. This is joint work with A.
Prabhakar Rao.