On Friday, September 6th, the Math Department kicked-off their year-long colloquium series with a talk given by our own Assistant Professor, Daniel Orr entitled "Finding the true place of nonsymmetric Macdonald polynomials."

He began by introducing the audience to Macdonald polynomials and highlighting their relation to a number of other areas of math such as differential equations and combinatorics. He ended by relating nonsymmetric Macdonald polynomials and equivariant K-theory of semi-infinite flag manifolds. 

Along the way he walked the audience through some notation and why it all was true. He even snuck in some hat-tips to research by Professors, Mark Shimozono, Nick Loehr, and Leonardo Mihalcea in the department. It was an excellent start to the series with many more great talks are to come.

Details on future talks can be found on the calendar: www.math.vt.edu/calendar