Solving Schubert Problems with Littlewood-Richardson Homotopies
This work provides a novel, optimal algorithm for solving Schubert problems, which are fundamental in algebraic geometry and combinatorics.
The authors present a new numerical homotopy continuation algorithm for solving Schubert problems on Grassmannians, achieving optimal path tracking for generic problems. The algorithm is implemented in PHCpack.
We present a new numerical homotopy continuation algorithm for finding all solutions to Schubert problems on Grassmannians. This Littlewood-Richardson homotopy is based on Vakil's geometric proof of the Littlewood-Richardson rule. Its start solutions are given by linear equations and they are tracked through a sequence of homotopies encoded by certain checker configurations to find the solutions to a given Schubert problem. For generic Schubert problems the number of paths tracked is optimal. The Littlewood-Richardson homotopy algorithm is implemented using the path trackers of the software package PHCpack.