Appendix A The Symmetric Group
Il faut, lorsque vous étudiez les propriétés du cercle, de la sphère et des sections coniques, que vous vous sentiez frères par l’esprit d’Euclide et d’Archimède et que, comme eux vous voyiez avec ravissement se développer le monde idéal des figures et des proportions dont les harmonies enchanteresses se retrouvent ensuite dans le monde réel. Jean Jaurès, Toulouse (1914)
The purpose of this appendix is essentially to fix the notations and to recall some elementary facts about the representations of the symmetric group that are needed in this book. The main result is the Schur Lemma which says that in characteristic zero any homogeneous polynomial functor is completely determined by a representation of the symmetric group. For more details the reader can consult any book on the subject, for instance [Mac95, Sag01].
A.1 Action of Groups
A.1.1 Group Algebra, Representation
The group algebra K[G] of a group G over a commutative algebra K is the free module with basis the elements of G. The product is induced by the product in the group: aigi aj gj = (aiaj )(gigj ). i j i,j
The tensor product of modules over K[G] is often denoted by −⊗G − instead of −⊗K[G] −.
J.-L. Loday, B. Vallette, Algebraic Operads, 567 Grundlehren der mathematischen Wissenschaften 346, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-30362-3, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012 568 A The Symmetric Group
A representation of the group G is a left module M over K[G]. The action of g ∈ G on m ∈ M is denoted either by g · m or by gm if there is no ambiguity. The algebra K[G] is called the regular representation of G when viewed as a left module over itself.
A.1.2 Invariants and Coinvariants
To any representation M of G is associated its space of invariants MG and its space of coinvariants MG defined as follows: MG := {m ∈ M | g · m = m, ∀g ∈ G},
MG := M/{g · m − m | g ∈ G, m ∈ M}. G The notation follows the usual convention since M is contravariant in G and MG is covariant in G. There is a natural map from invariants to coinvariants:
G M M MG.
Whenever G is finite and #G is invertible in the ground ring, then this map is an [ ]→ 1 · [ ] isomorphism. Indeed an inverse is given by m #G g∈G g m, where m is the class of m ∈ M in MG.
A.1.3 Restriction and Induction
Let H be a subgroup of G.Therestriction of a representation of G to H is simply the same space but viewed as a module over H .IfM is a right H -module, then the induced representation is the following representation of G:
G := ⊗ K[ ] IndH M M H G , where K[G] is viewed as a left module over K[H ] through the multiplication in K[ ] G ⊗ G . Observe that the space IndH M can be identified with the space M K K[H \G].
A.1.4 Equivariance
Let M and N be two (left) G-modules. A linear map f : M → N is said to be G- equivariant,orsimplyequivariant, if, for any g ∈ G, m ∈ M one has f(g· m) = g ·f(m). In other words f is a morphism in the category of G-modules. The space of A.2 Representations of the Symmetric Group Sn 569
G-equivariant maps is denoted by HomG(M, N) since it is made of the morphisms which are invariant for the action of G by (g · f )(m) := g−1 · f(g· m).IfL is another G-module, one has a natural isomorphism G ∼ Hom M,Hom(N, L) = Hom(M ⊗G N,L).
A.2 Representations of the Symmetric Group Sn
A.2.1 The Symmetric Group Sn
By definition the symmetric group Sn is the group of automorphisms of the set {1, 2,...,n}. Its elements are called permutations. The image of the permutation σ is denoted either by (σ (1),...,σ(n))or, sometimes, by [σ(1)...σ(n)]. The neutral element is denoted either by 1 or 1n or even idn. Let us denote by si the permutation which exchanges the elements i and i + 1 and leaves the others fixed. It is called a transposition and sometimes denoted by (i i + 1) (cycle notation). The transposi- tions generate Sn. In fact Sn is presented by the set of generators {s1,...,sn−1} and the set of relations ⎧ ⎨ 2 = = − si 1, for i 1,...,n 1, = | − |≥ ⎩sisj sj si, for i j 2, sisi+1si = si+1sisi+1, for i = 1,...,n− 2.
This is called the Coxeter presentation of the symmetric group. In general there is no preferred way of writing a permutation in terms of the Coxeter generators. However, for any permutation σ there is a minimum number of generators in such a writing. It is called the length of the permutation and is denoted by (σ ).For instance we have ([321]) = 3 since [321]=s1s2s1.
A.2.2 Irreducible Representations
A representation of Sn is said to be irreducible if it is not isomorphic to the direct sum of two nonzero representations. It can be shown that the isomorphism classes of representations of the symmetric group Sn are in one-to-one correspondence with = the partitions of the integer