Past exam of the groups and representations course of the University of Oxford / 2025 / 1 / a / Solution

A group representation on a vector space $V$ is a group homomorphism $R:G\to \mathrm{GL}(V)$, so $R(gh)=R(g)R(h)$ and $R(e)=I$. A nonzero group representation is an irreducible representation if its only invariant subspaces are $0$ and $V$. Here the representations and characters are finite-dimensional over the complex numbers.

The character of a representation is ${\chi }_R(g)=\mathrm{tr}R(g)$. Three useful properties are:

In particular, ${\chi }_R(e)=\dim V$ and ${\chi }_R(g^{-1})={\chi }_R(g{)}^{\ast }$, the latter following from unitarization of a finite-group representation. The character inner product $⟨{\chi }_r,{\chi }_R⟩$ counts the multiplicity of an irreducible representation $r$ in $R$.