Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2005/iii/paper-3/7/solution

A rim hook is a connected skew diagram containing no square, whose removal leaves a partition of an integer diagram. Its leg length is its number of occupied rows minus one. The Murnaghan–Nakayama rule states that, if a permutation has cycle type , then
Iteration removes one hook for each cycle length; the empty diagram has character one at the empty cycle type.
For shape and cycle type , there are exactly two removable four-cell rim hooks. The remaining shapes are and ; the removed hooks have leg lengths one and two respectively. In shape the only removable three-cell rim hook leaves and has leg length one. In shape the only such hook leaves and again has leg length one. Since the characters of and at a transposition are and , we obtain
and hence
The cycle lengths can be taken in any order; using makes the two branches of the computation explicit.
Now consider the ordinary induction product . A hook partition is , equivalently a partition of an integer whose second row has length at most one. If a hook shape occurs in the Littlewood–Richardson rule, then , forcing itself to be a hook. In the skew hook , the new cells consist of a segment in the first row and a segment down the first column, with no shared column between those two segments. Every first-row entry must be : its rightmost entry is the first letter of the lattice word, hence is , and weak row increase forces all entries to its left to be too. The column segment has strictly increasing entries. Thus only can be repeated, forcing the content to be a hook as well. This also proves the assertion when the top segment is empty, since then every entry lies in a strictly increasing column.
Write the two nonempty hook factors as and , with and . Let the prospective resulting hook have top-row length and leg length . Its new top segment has cells and its new column segment has cells. The content consists of ones and the single letters . All those larger letters must be in the new column; its strict increase allows either no or exactly one . There are therefore only two possibilities:
In the first case fill the top segment with ones and the column with . In the second, use top ones and column . Each filling is unique and has a lattice word, including the case with an empty top segment in the second filling. This proves
Both displayed multiplicities are one.
To deduce the full-cycle value from this product result, rather than quote the Murnaghan–Nakayama rule again, form the virtual character
For every proper Young subgroup and every pair of its irreducible characters, the hook-product calculation gives
If a factor is not a hook there are no hook constituents; if both are hooks, their two consecutive leg lengths cancel in this alternating inner product. By Frobenius reciprocity and the completeness of the product irreducible characters, restricts to zero on every such subgroup. Any permutation with more than one cycle preserves a nonempty proper subset and is conjugate into one of these subgroups. Thus is supported only on the class of -cycles.
Its inner product with the trivial character is one, since only the one-row hook contributes. That class has size , so , giving . For any irreducible character, the support calculation then yields
By character orthogonality, the left side is for and zero otherwise. These are real integers, proving
For the same conclusion holds directly. This derives the requested special case from the Littlewood–Richardson rule and Frobenius reciprocity.

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