Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2005 iii Paper 3 4 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Use for the ordinary irreducible character of . Multiplication of different degrees is the product in the induction ring of symmetric-group characters: it induces an external tensor product of group representations. For , the skew Young diagram is the set of cells of outside . A filling of it is a semistandard Young tableau when entries weakly increase along rows and strictly increase down columns. Its content means that occurs times. Its reading word takes each row right to left and the rows top to bottom. A lattice word has, in every initial segment, at least as many 's as 's for every .
The Littlewood–Richardson rule sayswhere the Littlewood–Richardson coefficient counts such skew semistandard fillings with content and lattice reading word. If is not contained in , the coefficient is zero. Over characteristic zero this is an actual direct-sum multiplicity statement; over other fields the analogous statement describes a Specht filtration, not necessarily a decomposition into simple modules.
For the required coefficient, the five skew cells areTheir columns are all distinct. Content uses three 's and two 's. The first reading letter must be by the lattice word condition, and row monotonicity forces both top cells to be . The remaining three cells, in reading order, can then be filled by , , or . The resulting words , , all satisfy the lattice inequalities, and exhaust the possibilities. Thus
For the determinantal form of a symmetric-group character, set in degree zero and for . The one-row character is trivial. The one-row specialization of the Littlewood–Richardson rule is the Pieri rule: multiplication by adds a horizontal strip of cells, since all entries are and no column can contain two of them.
Here is an explicit determinant argument, so that the desired form is genuinely deduced. Under the Frobenius characteristic map, corresponds to the complete homogeneous symmetric polynomial , whose monomials enumerate weakly increasing sequences of entries. Fix variables and rows. Let a directed lattice path run right or up from to , and assign weight to a horizontal step at height and weight one to a vertical step. The sum of its weights is . Expanding the determinant of this path matrix sums signed families connecting the sources to a permutation of the destinations.
Cancel intersecting families as follows. Choose the first intersection in a fixed order of vertices, and then the first pair of paths meeting there. Exchange their tails after that vertex. The total weight is unchanged, while the endpoint permutation changes by a transposition, reversing the sign. Choosing the intersection in this fixed order makes the operation an involution. The surviving families are nonintersecting; the ordered sources and ordered destinations force the identity endpoint pairing. Record the heights of the horizontal steps of path as row of a tableau. Rows weakly increase, and nonintersection of successive paths is precisely strict increase down the shared columns. Conversely every semistandard Young tableau gives one surviving path family. Thus the determinant has the semistandard-tableau generating function .
Young's rule identifies this generating function with the characteristic of : its coefficient at a monomial of weight is , the multiplicity obtained by pairing with the Young permutation module of type . The Frobenius characteristic map is injective and respects induction products. Transposing the path matrix does not change its determinant, soThis is the character version of the Jacobi–Trudi identity.
For the example the matrix isExpanding gives the concise answerAt the identity the six induction-product dimensions are , respectively; their alternating sum is , agreeing with the hook-length formula for .