Summary: Hilbert’s 15th problem called for a rigorous foundation of Schubert calculus, of which a long-standing and challenging part is the Schubert problem of characteristics. In the course of securing a foundation for algebraic geometry, Van der Waerden and Weil attributed this problem to the intersection theory of flag manifolds.
This article surveys the background, content, and solution of the problem of characteristics. Our main results are a unified formula for the characteristics and a systematic description of the intersection rings of flag manifolds. We illustrate the effectiveness of the formula and the algorithm by explicit examples.