Hecke algebras, KLR algebras, and James's conjecture

Abstract

I will give a brief account of the combinatorial representation theory of type A Iwahori–Hecke algebras, and their realisation as cyclotomic KLR algebras. In this story, I will largely focus on the decomposition number problem as one of the key problems in this field, and James's conjecture, which drove a lot of research until Williamson showed it to be false in 2013. While Williamson's counterexample is incredibly large, and beyond explicit computation, I recently discovered a new counterexample, which is of minimal size. I will explain this counterexample in the talk, as well as touching on how I found it.