An Invitation to the Generalized Saturation Conjecture

We report about some results, interesting examples, problems and conjectures revolving around the parabolic Kostant partition functions, the parabolic Kostka polynomials and ``saturation'' properties of several generalizations of the Littlewood--Richardson numbers.Comment: 79 pages, new sections, new results and example

Skew Divided Difference Operators and Schubert Polynomials

We study an action of the skew divided difference operators on the Schubert polynomials and give an explicit formula for structural constants for the Schubert polynomials in terms of certain weighted paths in the Bruhat order on the symmetric group. We also prove that, under certain assumptions, the skew divided difference operators transform the Schubert polynomials into polynomials with positive integer coefficients.Comment: This is a contribution to the Vadim Kuznetsov Memorial Issue on Integrable Systems and Related Topics, published in SIGMA (Symmetry, Integrability and Geometry: Methods and Applications) at http://www.emis.de/journals/SIGMA