About 10 years ago, Boris Shapiro and Michael Shapiro made a remarkable conjecture about real solutions to geometric problems coming from the classical Schubert calculus. While the conjecture remains open, there is truly overwhelming computational evidence supporting it, and Eremenko and Gabrielov proved it for Grassmannians of 2-planes, where the conjecture is the appealing statement that a rational function with only real critical points must be real.
In my talk, I will introduce the Shapiro conjecture and discuss what we know about it. This includes a simple counterexample and a refinement which is supported by massive experimental evidence. This evidence includes tantalizing computations which suggest a strengthening: that a certain discriminant polynomial is a sum of squares, or more generally that it has such an algebraic certificate of positivity.