Pipe Dreams Research Articles

The Fragile Home of a Precarious Girl: A Butlerian Study of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. Part One

The present article aims to explore Butler’s notion of precarity in Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. Agencies that induce precarity in characters of the play, Laura in particular, reaction to the repercussions of precariousness and the ways it leads to a new identity are also put under scrutiny. In the last decades, feminist and gender studies, with all their subcategories and subdivisions, have been one of the main concerns and interests in literary criticism as well as in social and cultural studies. A highly influential scholar in feminist and gender studies is Judith Butler. Normative power and gender related issues are sustained motifs throughout the study, which addresses the following questions: What are the roots of Laura’s feeling of precarity? How does her precarity affect and inflict those around her? How does she cope with or respond to her sense of precarity? To answer these questions, the researcher will draw upon Butler’s conception of precarity and precariousness and will focus on such key terms as femininity, patriarchy, pipe dreams, physical impairment, regulative system, and financial insecurity. This section of the article is divided into three main parts, namely, “Introduction,” “Theoretical Framework,” and “Analysis,” which comprises “Femininity” and “Disability.”

Gröbner bases, symmetric matrices, and type C Kazhdan–Lusztig varieties

AbstractWe study a class of combinatorially defined polynomial ideals that are generated by minors of a generic symmetric matrix. Included within this class are the symmetric determinantal ideals, the symmetric ladder determinantal ideals, and the symmetric Schubert determinantal ideals of A. Fink, J. Rajchgot, and S. Sullivant. Each ideal in our class is a type C analog of a Kazhdan–Lusztig ideal of A. Woo and A. Yong; that is, it is the scheme‐theoretic defining ideal of the intersection of a type C Schubert variety with a type C opposite Schubert cell, appropriately coordinatized. The Kazhdan–Lusztig ideals that arise are exactly those where the opposite cell is 123‐avoiding. Our main results include Gröbner bases for these ideals, prime decompositions of their initial ideals (which are Stanley–Reisner ideals of subword complexes), and combinatorial formulas for their multigraded Hilbert series in terms of pipe dreams.

Is the media missing the point on the transnational American desalination pipe dream?

AbstractThe media plays a central role in the dissemination of information about globally significant, transboundary issues like world water policy and infrastructure projects. This discussion makes its point of departure on the topic of large‐scale seawater desalination (producing potable ocean water) in the American borderlands and Southwest region, an area that has recently been plagued by droughts, as well as being the subject of much reporting on the feasibility of expanding water infrastructure across the United States and Mexico. In particular, The New York Times has produced a series of stories on water scarcity in the state of Arizona and the “pipe dreams” of building a desalination plant in Mexico that would produce water to be pumped through a national monument, and into major Arizonan metropolitan areas like Phoenix and Tucson. This reportage has been useful in bringing water concerns amidst climate change to a broader audience, simultaneously challenging the well‐known American “growth machine” paradigm. However, when considering the recent scholarship from social scientists and water policy scholars, the media may be missing the point. In this transboundary region, when we consider existing evidence as well as the reports that have emerged in Arizona and Mexico, it becomes clear that water from desalination is a luxury good, and the industry continues to have a dubious political and economic track record when dealing with water providers, public and private. Therefore, more discussions of desalination in world water policy circles need to be asking who is served by desalination, as it increasingly represents a model of the overproduction of water in places that do not need it, therefore entrenching social inequality.

Bijective Proofs of Monk's rule for Schubert and Double Schubert Polynomials with Bumpless Pipe Dreams

We give bijective proofs of Monk's rule for Schubert and double Schubert polynomials computed with bumpless pipe dreams. In particular, they specialize to bijective proofs of transition and cotransition formulas of Schubert and double Schubert polynomials, which can be used to establish bijections with ordinary pipe dreams.

The Canonical Bijection between Pipe Dreams and Bumpless Pipe Dreams

Abstract We present a direct bijection between reduced pipe dreams and reduced bumpless pipe dreams (BPDs) by interpreting reduced compatible sequences on BPDs and show that this is the unique bijection preserving bijective realizations of Monk’s formula, establishing its canonical nature.

Lenart's Bijection via Bumpless Pipe Dreams

Pipe dreams and bumpless pipe dreams for vexillary permutations are each known to be in bijection with certain semistandard tableaux via maps due to Lenart and Weigandt, respectively. Recently, Gao and Huang have defined a bijection between the former two sets. In this note we show for vexillary permutations that the Gao-Huang bijection preserves the associated tableaux, giving a new proof of Lenart's result. Our methods extend to give a recording tableau for any bumpless pipe dream.

Pipe Dreams: How Bureaucratic Hurdles and Identity Politics Shape Urban Water Scarcity

Pipe Dreams: How Bureaucratic Hurdles and Identity Politics Shape Urban Water Scarcity

Rani Russell Shea: Turning Pipe Dreams into Pipelines at Siemens Advanta?

Rani Russell Shea: Turning Pipe Dreams into Pipelines at Siemens Advanta?

Schubert Products for Permutations with Separated Descents

Abstract We say that two permutations $\pi $ and $\rho $ have separated descents at position $k$ if $\pi $ has no descents before position $k$ and $\rho $ has no descents after position $k$. We give a counting formula, in terms of reduced word tableaux, for computing the structure constants of products of Schubert polynomials indexed by permutations with separated descents, and recognize that these structure constants are certain Edelman–Greene coefficients. Our approach uses generalizations of Schützenberger’s jeu de taquin algorithm and the Edelman–Greene correspondence via bumpless pipe dreams.

Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia's Aral Sea Basin by Maya K. Peterson (review).

Reviewed by: Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia's Aral Sea Basin by Maya K. Peterson Marianne Kamp (bio) Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia's Aral Sea Basin By Maya K. Peterson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xxii + 399. The continuity of a vision for irrigation is on display in Peterson's Pipe Dreams, where the author's research reveals that Imperial Russia's dreams of constructing vast new systems of canals in Central Asia's arid lands found even more grandiose fulfillment when the Soviet government implemented its development plans. At times engineers and investors drew on indigenous Central Asian knowledge, but more frequently, top-down plans ran into material, social, economic, and natural obstacles. Peterson highlights three inherently contradictory goals that the Russian and Soviet governments pursued: turning Kyrgyz nomads into sedentary farmers, opening Central Asia to settlement by colonizers, and making Central Asia into the land of cotton. Starting in the 1860s, when Russia's geographers first set foot in the newly conquered lands, they imagined rerouting the lower reaches of the Amu River to reach the Caspian Sea and watering land that they saw as empty desert—believing it to be unused because it was not farmed. All that was required to make it useful was investment, expertise, and labor. A collection of diaries, reports, and letters to the Romanov Grand Duke Nikolai Konstantinovich allows Peterson to examine the repeated failures and moderate successes of canal building through the Hungry Steppe between Bekabod and Jizzakh (in today's Uzbekistan), not only as a water-control project, but also through the lenses of the Russian peasants who settled there. The sources attest to the peasants' apparent gratitude to the Russian government, and they illustrate an innovative social experiment that combined indigenous Central Asian and colonizer labor to provide both groups with irrigable fields. Those human dimensions are Peterson's contribution to what was otherwise a small-scale water engineering project that has attracted historians' attention, from a 1927 account by V. V. Tsinzerling to Julia Obertreis's Imperial Desert Dreams (2017), primarily because of its abundant archival traces rather than because of any transformative dimensions. [End Page 1185] Competition between indigenous peoples and colonizers is abundantly evident in Peterson's wholly novel research on irrigation projects in the Chu River valley, near today's Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. As seen by Russian administrators, the lush grasslands that Kyrgyz herders apportioned through kin networks needed to be plowed and farmed to reach their productive capacity. Russian administrators crafted legal means to seize land, and settlers from Russia arrived in large numbers. Experts who designed the canal scheme were thwarted by lack of investment, so that the building project dragged on through World War I and into the Civil War years that followed the Russian Revolution. Project administrators recruited Uyghur and Dungan labor migrants from Xinjiang and contracted for prison labor, while Russians and Kyrgyz fought over land—the massacres inspiring the nascent Bolshevik government to restrict colonization. Pipe Dreams follows administrative visions for controlling water through a series of episodes from Imperial Russia to the Soviet years. In the 1890s, Russia's successful introduction of the highly productive American Upland strain of cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) directed attention to the possibilities for expanding irrigation into dry lands; after the Revolution, increasing cotton production became the obsession of Soviet-era plans for Central Asia, to the detriment of grain growing and livestock husbandry. Soviet-style investment featured massive, highly publicized building projects, one of which was the 1930s Vakhshstroi in southern Tajikistan, whose goal was populating the Vakhsh valley with indigenous cotton growers. Archives reveal the abundant problems that beset this venture, which relied on attracting tens of thousands of laborers to resettle in the area, including labor turnover and hydrology engineering failures resulting in many years of missed targets. Unlike Vakhstroi—where Soviet engineers took pride in using heavy machinery despite being plagued by problems—the Grand Fergana Canal, as well as many subsequent large canals in Soviet Uzbekistan, was dug by several hundred thousand Uzbek peasants in a celebrated "people's construction" campaign, using what Peterson views as the most extreme degree of state...

Pipe dreams for Schubert polynomials of the classical groups

Schubert polynomials for the classical groups were defined by S.Billey and M.Haiman in 1995; they are polynomial representatives of Schubert classes in a full flag variety over a classical group. We provide a combinatorial description for these polynomials, as well as their double versions, by introducing analogues of pipe dreams, or RC-graphs, for Weyl groups of classical types.

Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse

Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse

Michael Gold: The People’s Writer

Michael Gold: The People’s Writer

Gröbner geometry for skew-symmetric matrix Schubert varieties

Matrix Schubert varieties are the closures of the orbits of B×B acting on all n×n matrices, where B is the group of invertible lower triangular matrices. Extending work of Fulton, Knutson and Miller identified a Gröbner basis for the prime ideals of these varieties. They also showed that the corresponding initial ideals are Stanley-Reisner ideals of shellable simplicial complexes, and derived a related primary decomposition in terms of reduced pipe dreams. These results lead to a geometric proof of the Billey-Jockusch-Stanley formula for a Schubert polynomial, among many other applications. We define skew-symmetric matrix Schubert varieties to be the nonempty intersections of matrix Schubert varieties with the subspace of skew-symmetric matrices. In analogy with Knutson and Miller's work, we describe a natural generating set for the prime ideals of these varieties. We then compute a related Gröbner basis. Using these results, we identify a primary decomposition for the corresponding initial ideals involving certain fpf-involution pipe dreams. We show that these initial ideals are likewise the Stanley-Reisner ideals of shellable simplicial complexes. As an application, we give a geometric proof of an explicit generating function for symplectic Grothendieck polynomials. Our methods differ from Knutson and Miller's and can be used to give new proofs of some of their results, as we explain at the end of this article.

Pipe Dreams: The Effects of Stream Bank Soil Pipes on Hyporheic Denitrification Caused by a Peak Flow Event

AbstractPeak flow events in gaining stream/river channels cause lung model hyporheic exchange with the banks (bank storage), which fosters beneficial reactions as polluted channel water cycles through riparian groundwater. Soil pipes are common along stream/riverbanks, and enhance exchange, yet their effect on reactions such as denitrification is unknown. We used MODFLOW with the Conduit Flow Package to simulate lung model exchange during a peak flow event in a section of stream bank/riparian soil with soil pipes, and MT3D‐USGS to estimate nitrate transport and denitrification. We varied soil matrix hydraulic conductivity (K) and first‐order reaction constant (k), as well as soil pipe density, length, and height above the initial channel water surface elevation (H). The addition of soil pipes enhanced stream bank (riparian) denitrification relative to banks without pipes, e.g., a 76% increase due to adding a single 1.5 m pipe. Denitrification increased linearly with pipe density but exhibited nonlinear trends with other parameters. Sensitivity analysis revealed length and density to be most influential. Soil pipe enhancement of denitrification was governed by hyporheic volume in most cases in our study. Exceptions included (a) coarse soil (K = 10−3 m/s) and (b) low k and H > 0. Scaling our results to the stream corridor scale estimated that five soil pipes per m cumulatively induced 3% nitrate removal along a 1 km reach. Overall, soil pipes enhanced advection of nitrate into the banks, and also increased residence times of that nitrate under certain conditions, which together enhanced denitrification. This enhancement has implications for excess nitrate management in watersheds.

Hopf dreams and diagonal harmonics

This paper introduces a Hopf algebra structure on a family of reduced pipe dreams. We show that this Hopf algebra is free and cofree, and construct a surjection onto a commutative Hopf algebra of permutations. The pipe dream Hopf algebra contains Hopf subalgebras with interesting sets of generators and Hilbert series related to subsequences of Catalan numbers. Three other relevant Hopf subalgebras include the Loday–Ronco Hopf algebra on complete binary trees, a Hopf algebra related to a special family of lattice walks on the quarter plane, and a Hopf algebra on ν $\nu$ -trees related to ν $\nu$ -Tamari lattices. One of this Hopf subalgebras motivates a new notion of Hopf chains in the Tamari lattice, which are used to present applications and conjectures in the theory of multivariate diagonal harmonics.

Crossing Boundaries: Maya Peterson’s Pipe Dreams

Crossing BoundariesMaya Peterson’s Pipe Dreams Adrienne Edgar (bio) Anyone who has traveled in rural areas of Central Asia will recall seeing oozing, salt-encrusted fields, rendered unfit for cultivation by faulty Soviet irrigation practices. On my first visit to Turkmenistan in the 1990s, I passed miles of such ruined land on my way to a friend’s home village.1 While the devastation of the Aral Sea is the best-known result of the Soviet drive for cotton in the region, the environmental effects of Soviet rule extend far beyond the shores of that doomed body of water. Maya Peterson’s important book helps us understand how this situation came to be. In Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin, Peterson tells a story of technology, modernist ideology, and imperial hubris.2 The drive to remake Central Asia’s land and water, begun under the tsars, reached its culmination in the Soviet era. In a perfect cascade of unintended consequences, Soviet “modernizing” policies of agricultural development in Central Asia resulted in famine, the spread of malaria, the destruction of agricultural land through salinization, and the desertification of the Aral Sea and surrounding areas. Water and the environment are vitally important yet neglected aspects of Soviet history. Discontent over environmental damage was a key factor fueling the separatist sentiments that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet successor states are still struggling with the legacy of poor stewardship of natural resources. Yet the study of environmental history in Russia and the Soviet Union is in its infancy, and the number of works on this topic relating [End Page 352] specifically to Central Asia can be counted on the fingers of one hand.3 In Pipe Dreams, as Peterson explains in the introduction, the physical environment is not just the setting for the action; nature, and especially the vital yet unpredictable resource of water in all its forms, is itself a key actor. The book’s narrative arc follows the course of Central Asia’s rivers from the Aral Sea and lower Amu Darya into the mountains and back again, as Peterson tells of the human actors who sought to harness, manage, and control these waters. Like Central Asia’s waters, Peterson’s narrative crosses borders and transcends boundaries both physical and chronological. While many works on Soviet Central Asia have focused on a particular “national republic” (partly because the structure of Soviet archives nudges historians in this direction), Pipe Dreams follows the story of water and irrigation wherever it leads, paying little heed to the Soviet-drawn borders separating Kazakhstan from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan from Uzbekistan.4 Peterson’s source base is extensive and includes Russian imperial and Soviet archives from five different post-Soviet countries, as well as a wide array of published materials. Peterson’s research also transcends international borders. She views Russian and Soviet hydraulic projects in Central Asia as part of the global Irrigation Age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in which science and technology were harnessed to bring water to arid regions and to turn “wastelands” into prosperous areas. These modernist visions sought to transform arid landscapes in places as diverse as North Africa, China, Australia, and the American West. Chronologically, Peterson does not allow her account to be limited by the traditional periodization of Russian/Soviet history, which has tended to emphasize the rupture of the 1917 revolution. She argues convincingly that the roots of the Aral Sea disaster do not just lie in Stalinist “gigantomania” and the communist drive for agricultural and industrial development but stretch back into the 19th century. She sees continuity in the goals and methods of Central Asia’s imperial [End Page 353] Russian and Soviet rulers, each of whom pursued “modern”—and ultimately self-serving and destructive—ways of watering and cultivating the region. As the book’s title tells us, Pipe Dreams is about both water and empire, and Peterson’s focus on continuity and the physical environment allows us to see empire in Eurasia in new ways. Few would dispute the imperial qualities of the Russian Empire, but debates about the nature of...

Collaboration, Resistance, and Imperial Power

Collaboration, Resistance, and Imperial Power Ian W. Campbell (bio) Graduate school recruitment is an odd time to make a friend. Yet in 2005, drinking overpriced beer at an off-campus bar in Ann Arbor with Maya Peterson, I knew immediately that I had found one. In the years that followed, she proved to be a brilliant, generous, and supportive colleague, with whom it was always a joy to think through the nature of Russian imperialism in Central Asia. It is still hard to believe and unbearably sad that we must talk about these questions—about the issues that her work helped us understand—not with her on an adventurous hike or after a full day of conference panels, but without her. Indeed, Peterson’s wonderful first book, Pipe Dreams, sheds light on several perennial issues not only in the historiography of the Russian Empire but in the history of imperialism more generally.1 In particular, it highlights the importance of cooperation and collaboration in sustaining imperial ventures, and the potential for resistance to such ventures in both the inhabitants and environment in Russian Turkestan. In Pipe Dreams, neither water nor people can be easily coerced to achieve a desired outcome. Since the publication of Ronald Robinson’s seminal piece in 1972, it has become a commonplace that “imperialism was as much a function of its victims’ collaboration or non-collaboration … as it was of European expansion.”2 This is an insight applicable not only to the forms that imperial rule took (i.e., settlement, occupation, or the “imperialism of free trade”) but to the fate of specific ventures within a colony. This is not to say that such cooperation, when it occurred, took place on equal terms; Peterson rightly follows Arjun Appadurai’s argument that “cooperation is a state of affairs that [End Page 345] involves … [parties] of different economic capability and that may not be regarded as especially desirable by some of the parties involved.”3 That very inequality, the tenuousness of the arrangements into which colonial administrators entered with local power brokers, forced the latter into a set of what Michael Khodarkovsky has called “bitter choices,” seeding the potential for resistance even in ostensibly collaborative ventures.4 The Russian Empire, like any other, depended on the support of local elites to implement and articulate its visions—indeed, often to secure the cooperation (or at least quiescence) of the population of its colonies. When it failed to offer sufficient incentives to cooperate, or its ambitions went beyond what colonial subjects could bear, its ambitions were jeopardized. The weakness of tsarist rule in Central Asia and its consequent dependence on local power structures and customs stood at variance with the self-image of the men who made the empire and fundamentally constrained the projects they might undertake; this was the case both in the Turkestan Governor-Generalship and the vassal states of Bukhara and Khiva.5 It was one thing to “project imperialist notions of modernity, civilization, and progress” onto the Central Asian landscape, but to put these notions into practice was quite another.6 Tsarist and other European observers found much to criticize about Central Asian water management and hoped by introducing new technologies and techniques of irrigation to both foster the economic development of the colony and legitimate their own rule. Canal systems and dams looked “primitive” and “incorrect”; methods of surveying and water measurement appeared to be frustratingly imprecise; the whole enterprise required a backbreaking amount of physical labor.7 But as a matter of pragmatism, particularly in the first decades after the conquest of Central Asia, they had little choice but to devolve authority to native administrators and acquiesce to customs, practices, and technologies that they disliked. [End Page 346] Local authorities were important for water management because of both who they were and what they knew. Attempts by the first governor-general of Turkestan, Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman, to assert Russian bureaucratic control over the region’s water resources were short-lived. Statutory law in Turkestan conformed, for the most part, not to this abortive measure but to the general direction of Kaufman’s viceregal rule, intervening only hesitantly to avoid provoking disturbances in the...

The Protagonists of Pipe Dreams

The Protagonists of Pipe Dreams

Gröbner geometry of Schubert polynomials through ice

The geometric naturality of Schubert polynomials and their combinatorial pipe dream representations was established by Knutson and Miller (2005) via antidiagonal Gröbner degeneration of matrix Schubert varieties. We consider instead diagonal Gröbner degenerations. In this dual setting, Knutson, Miller, and Yong (2009) obtained alternative combinatonarics for the class of “vexillary” matrix Schubert varieties. We initiate a study of general diagonal degenerations, relating them to a neglected formula of Lascoux (2002) in terms of the 6-vertex ice model (recently rediscovered by Lam, Lee, and Shimozono (2021) in the guise of “bumpless pipe dreams”).