January 30, 1997

Jiang-Hua Lu, University of Arizona
"Poisson goemetry and the Schubert calculus"

Abstract: The theory of quantum groups gives rise to various Poisson structures on semi-simple Lie groups and their homogeneous spaces. In this talk, we make connections between these Poisson structures and a series of theorems of Kostant in the 60's on Lie algebra cohomology. In particular, we interpret Kostant's harmonic forms on the flag manifold $G/B$ in terms of moment maps and Liouville volume forms coming from the Bruhat Poisson structure on the flag manifold.