John Francis and I are organizing a seminar at MIT to prepare for the Talbot workshop at the end of March. The aim of the seminar is to help people understand Gaitsgory’s preprint about quantum geometric Satake and quantum Langlands, which should play a significant role in the workshop. As it happens, Joel posted about this very result last August.

I gave the first talk on Wednesday, giving an overview of the subject, and I just put some notes up on the seminar page. I tried to gloss over as many technical details as possible, because of the time constraints, but I’d like to hear about any actual errors, significant or not. The talk ended up bearing some structural similarity to Joel’s post (pure coincidence – although I said a bit more about tori). Speaker recruitment went perhaps a little too successfully, since I forgot that one of the weeks was spring break.

Addendum: If you’re a fan of Koszul duality, the notes from the Chicago talk (on the seminar page) have a sketch of a proof of the equivalence between factorizable sheaves and quantum group representations using a rather odd manifestation of Koszul duality.