| Résume | I will talk about the papers arXiv:2109.01499 and arXiv:2004.07824 joint with Maciej Dołęga, and with Valentin Bonzom. By using the deformation of characters of the symmetric group obtained by deforming Schur functions into Jack polynomials, we introduce a one-parameter deformation of Hurwitz numbers, the ``b-deformed Hurwitz numbers''. The Goulden-Jackson b-conjecture from 1996 (and variants) asserts that these numbers are well defined (positive) and have to do with the enumeration of maps on non-oriented surfaces. I will talk about recent progress towards the conjecture, and other developments related to b-deformed "monotone" Hurwitz numbers and \beta-ensembles of random matrices. |
