representation theory of the symmetric group

In mathematics, the representation theory of the symmetric group is a particular case of the representation theory of finite groups, for which a concrete and detailed theory can be obtained. This has a large area of potential applications, from symmetric function theory to problems of quantum mechanics for a number of identical particles. The symmetric group S_n has order n!. Its conjugacy classes are labeled by partitions of n. Therefore according to the representation theory of a finite group, the number of inequivalent irreducible representations, over the complex numbers, is equal to the number of partitions of n. They are labeled by Young diagrams. Each irreducible representation can be explicitly constructed from the Young diagrams by computing the Young symmetrizer for each tableau.

References

William Fulton and Joe Harris, Representation Theory, A First Course (1991) Springer Verlag New York, ISBN 0-387-974495-4 See Chapter 4

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