Representations of Finite Groups Course Notes Katherine Christianson Spring 2016 Katherine Christianson Representation Theory Notes 2 A Note to the Reader These notes were taken in a course titled \Representations of Finite Groups," taught by Professor Mikhail Khovanov at Columbia University in spring 2016. With the exception of the proofs of a few theorems in the classification of the McKay graphs of finite subgroups of SU(2) (at the end of Section 4.2.3), I believe that these notes cover all the material presented in class during that semester. I have not organized the notes in chronological order but have instead arranged them thematically, because I think that will make them more useful for reference and review. The first chapter contains all background material on topics other than representation theory (for instance, abstract algebra and category theory). The second chapter contains the core of the representation theory covered in the course. The third chapter contains several constructions of representations (for instance, tensor product and induced representations). Finally, the fourth chapter contains applications of the theory in Chapters 2 and 3 to group theory and also to specific areas of interest in representation theory. Although I have edited these notes as carefully as I could, there are no doubt mistakes in many places. If you find any, please let me know at this email address:
[email protected]. If you have any other questions or comments about the notes, feel free to email me about those as well. Good luck, and happy studying! i Katherine Christianson Representation Theory Notes ii Chapter 1 Algebra and Category Theory 1.1 Vector Spaces 1.1.1 Infinite-Dimensional Spaces and Zorn's Lemma In a standard linear algebra course, one often sees proofs of many basic facts about finite-dimensional vector spaces (for instance, that every finite-dimensional vector space has a basis).