About a generalisation of Sylvester’s law of inertia, talk by Stéphanie Cupit-Foutou

Sylvester’s law of inertia can be formulated in terms of group actions when considering real linear groups acting on real quadratic forms by base change. After reviewing this celebrated result from this perspective, I will give a generalisation of it in the setting of so-called spherical varieties (a class of complex varieties including flag varieties, toric varieties, symmetric spaces, etc.). This is a joint work with D. Timashev