The Shapiro Conjecture
Frank Sottile
Texas A&M University
18 November 2005
Séminaire Géométrie, Université de Savoie

   
About 10 years ago, Boris Shapiro and Michael Shapiro made a remarkable conjecture about real solutions to geometric problems coming from the classical Schubert calculus. While the conjecture remains open, there is truly overwhelming computational evidence supporting it, and Eremenko and Gabrielov proved it for Grassmannians of 2-planes, where the conjecture is the appealing statement that a rational function with only real critical points must be real.

In my talk, I will introduce the Shapiro conjecture and discuss what we know about it. This includes a simple counterexample and a refinement which is supported by massive experimental evidence.