UW-PIMS Mathematics Colloquium: Lauren Williams

The positive Grassmannian is a remarkable subset of the real Grassmannian which has recently arisen in diverse contexts such as integrable systems, scattering amplitudes, and free probability. I will provide an elementary introduction to the positive Grassmannian, focusing on a few intriguing aspects: what it "looks like," and its connection to shallow water waves (via the KP hierarchy).