Dualities for Lie superalgebras

We explain how Lie superalgebras of types gl and osp provide a natural framework generalizing the classical Schur and Howe dualities. This exposition includes a discussion of super duality, which connects the parabolic categories O between classical Lie superalgebras and Lie algebras. Super duality provides a conceptual solution to the irreducible character problem for these Lie superalgebras in terms of the classical Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials.