The Connecticut Valley Colloquium

4:30 pm, Monday, 13 December 1999
Seelye Hall, Room 201

Professor Aloysius Helminck

North Carolina State University

Reductive symmetric spaces and their applications

Abstract
Reductive symmetric spaces are defined as the homogeneous spaces

G/H with

G a reductive algebraic group defined over a field

k and

H=G^q the fixed point group of an involution

q . These symmetric spaces occur in many problems in representation theory, geometry and singularity theory. Best known are the real reductive symmetric spaces with

H compact, which are also called Riemannian symmetric spaces. The representation theory and Plancherel formulas of the general real reductive symmetric spaces has been studied extensively in the last few decades, what finally resulted in a Plancherel formula in 1996. Other cases of interest are symmetric spaces over finite fields, number fields and

p-adic fields.

Refreshments at 4:00 pm in the Math Forum on the third floor of Burton Hall
Talk at 4:30 pm in Seelye 201
Dinner at 5:45 pm, Green Street Cafe