Recent work of A. Postnikov shows that cylindric skew Schur functions, which are a generalisation of skew Schur functions, have a strong connection with a problem of considerable current interest: that of finding a combinatorial proof of the non-negativity of the 3-point Gromov-Witten invariants. After explaining this motivation, we study cylindric skew Schur functions from the point of view of Schur-positivity. Using a result of I. Gessel and C. Krattenthaler, we generalise a formula of A. Bertram, I. Ciocan-Fontanine and W. Fulton, thus giving an expansion of an arbitrary cylindric skew Schur function in terms of skew Schur functions. While we show that no non-trivial cylindric skew Schur functions is Schur-positive, we conjecture that this can be reconciled using the new concept of cylindric Schur-positivity.

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