Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2009 ii Paper 4 19F a Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
The restriction of a representation to is the same vector space and operators with the domain limited to ; its character is . Averaging a positive Hermitian inner product over makes it invariant, so invariant subspaces have invariant orthogonal complements. Repeating gives a direct sum of irreducible -spaces and hence with nonnegative integer multiplicities.
By character inner product orthogonality,since is irreducible and has normalized squared norm one on . Equality holds precisely when the omitted nonnegative terms vanish, namely . This is the restriction multiplicity bound.