May 18 – 22, 2026
Virginia Tech
America/New_York timezone

Special orthogonal, special unitary, and symplectic groups as products of Grassmannians

May 20, 2026, 10:45 AM
25m
Goodwin Hall 135 (Virginia Tech)

Goodwin Hall 135

Virginia Tech

Minisymposium Talk Matrix Geometries Matrix Geometries

Speaker

Xiang Lu (University of Chicago)

Description

We describe a curious structure of the special orthogonal, special unitary, and symplectic groups that has not been observed, namely, they can be expressed as matrix products of their corresponding Grassmannians realized as involution matrices. We will show that $\text{SO}(n)$ is a product of two real Grassmannians, $\text{SU}(n)$ a product of four complex Grassmannians, and $\text{Sp}(2n, \mathbb{R})$ or $\text{Sp}(2n, \mathbb{C})$ a product of four symplectic Grassmannians over $\mathbb{R}$ or $\mathbb{C}$ respectively.

Authors

Lek-Heng Lim (The University of Chicago) Prof. Ke Ye (the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences) Xiang Lu (University of Chicago)

Presentation materials

There are no materials yet.