MOS

Abstract

In 1960, Feit and Fine found a beautiful formula for the number of commuting n by n matrices over the finite field F_q. Their result can be reinterpreted as a formula for the motivic class of the commuting variety in the Grothendieck group. We will describe a simple new proof of their formula which allows us to generalize the result to several other settings with applications to motivic Donaldson-Thomas theory.