Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2006/iii/paper-4/2/solution

A standard Young tableau is a filling by , each used once, increasing along rows and down columns. A semistandard Young tableau is a filling by positive integers, weakly increasing along rows and strictly increasing down columns. Its content means that the entry occurs times. The Kostka number counts semistandard tableaux of shape and content . The dominance order on partitions is
Strict dominance adds . The Young permutation module is .
Let be a composition factor of . It occurs as a submodule of some quotient , so its defining surjection gives a nonzero map . With the row reversal from Question 1, , , and the cyclic generator cannot have zero image under . Therefore acts nontrivially on , and hence on . The column-cancellation argument proves .
When , the identity shows more: the image of every nonzero map is . In a composition series of , a factor isomorphic to can thus occur only at the step where first becomes contained in the series term. Once contained, every later such map would have zero image. Since the quotient of the submodule certainly occurs when is regular, it occurs exactly once. If is not regular, no simple is indexed by . Consequently every other factor has a strictly dominating regular label. The same conclusion holds for ; when regular, its radical quotient supplies the unique factor.
The integral standard-basis theorem says that the standard polytabloids form a basis over every field. Thus is independent of characteristic. In the decomposition matrix, rows are indexed by all ordinary shapes and columns by regular shapes :
Ordering shapes by a common linear extension of dominance gives a rectangular triangular matrix, whose regular-row square submatrix is unitriangular. The standard basis also gives .
Young's rule states that has a Specht filtration with copies of . In characteristic zero this is a direct-sum decomposition into irreducibles. In positive characteristic these are Specht factors, not simple factors; rather
For content and shape , entries at most must lie in the first rows, because columns strictly increase. Their number is exactly the size of those rows, so successive rows must be filled by their row number. Hence . A one-row shape has a unique weakly increasing arrangement of any prescribed content, so . Content uses every label once, making semistandard and standard conditions identical, so .
For content only the entries are available; strict columns allow at most two rows. In shape every bottom entry is and every entry above it is . The remaining top row is uniquely fixed by the content, and such a filling exists exactly for when . Young's rule therefore gives
where multiplication denotes induction from the indicated Young subgroup, not pointwise multiplication of characters of the same group. The dimension of this permutation module is . Subtracting the analogous identity with yields
with for . This dimension holds over every field.

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