Immanant

Last updated

In mathematics, the immanant of a matrix was defined by Dudley E. Littlewood and Archibald Read Richardson as a generalisation of the concepts of determinant and permanent.

Contents

Let be a partition of an integer and let be the corresponding irreducible representation-theoretic character of the symmetric group . The immanant of an matrix associated with the character is defined as the expression

Examples

The determinant is a special case of the immanant, where is the alternating character , of Sn, defined by the parity of a permutation.

The permanent is the case where is the trivial character, which is identically equal to 1.

For example, for matrices, there are three irreducible representations of , as shown in the character table:

111
1−11
20−1

As stated above, produces the permanent and produces the determinant, but produces the operation that maps as follows:

Properties

The immanant shares several properties with determinant and permanent. In particular, the immanant is multilinear in the rows and columns of the matrix; and the immanant is invariant under simultaneous permutations of the rows or columns by the same element of the symmetric group.

Littlewood and Richardson studied the relation of the immanant to Schur functions in the representation theory of the symmetric group.

The necessary and sufficient conditions for the immanant of a Gram matrix to be are given by Gamas's Theorem.

Related Research Articles

In mathematics, the determinant is a scalar value that is a certain function of the entries of a square matrix. The determinant of a matrix A is commonly denoted det(A), det A, or |A|. Its value characterizes some properties of the matrix and the linear map represented, on a given basis, by the matrix. In particular, the determinant is nonzero if and only if the matrix is invertible and the corresponding linear map is an isomorphism. The determinant of a product of matrices is the product of their determinants.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Permutation</span> Mathematical version of an order change

In mathematics, a permutation of a set can mean one of two different things:

In mathematics, when X is a finite set with at least two elements, the permutations of X (i.e. the bijective functions from X to X) fall into two classes of equal size: the even permutations and the odd permutations. If any total ordering of X is fixed, the parity (oddness or evenness) of a permutation of X can be defined as the parity of the number of inversions for σ, i.e., of pairs of elements x, y of X such that x < y and σ(x) > σ(y).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Special unitary group</span> Group of unitary matrices with determinant of 1

In mathematics, the special unitary group of degree n, denoted SU(n), is the Lie group of n × n unitary matrices with determinant 1.

In the mathematical field of representation theory, a weight of an algebra A over a field F is an algebra homomorphism from A to F, or equivalently, a one-dimensional representation of A over F. It is the algebra analogue of a multiplicative character of a group. The importance of the concept, however, stems from its application to representations of Lie algebras and hence also to representations of algebraic and Lie groups. In this context, a weight of a representation is a generalization of the notion of an eigenvalue, and the corresponding eigenspace is called a weight space.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cayley graph</span> Graph defined from a mathematical group

In mathematics, a Cayley graph, also known as a Cayley color graph, Cayley diagram, group diagram, or color group, is a graph that encodes the abstract structure of a group. Its definition is suggested by Cayley's theorem, and uses a specified set of generators for the group. It is a central tool in combinatorial and geometric group theory. The structure and symmetry of Cayley graphs makes them particularly good candidates for constructing expander graphs.

In statistics, the Wishart distribution is a generalization of the gamma distribution to multiple dimensions. It is named in honor of John Wishart, who first formulated the distribution in 1928. Other names include Wishart ensemble, or Wishart–Laguerre ensemble, or LOE, LUE, LSE.

In mathematics, the determinant of an m×m skew-symmetric matrix can always be written as the square of a polynomial in the matrix entries, a polynomial with integer coefficients that only depends on m. When m is odd, the polynomial is zero. When m is even, it is a nonzero polynomial of degree m/2, and is unique up to multiplication by ±1. The convention on skew-symmetric tridiagonal matrices, given below in the examples, then determines one specific polynomial, called the Pfaffian polynomial. The value of this polynomial, when applied to the entries of a skew-symmetric matrix, is called the Pfaffian of that matrix. The term Pfaffian was introduced by Cayley, who indirectly named them after Johann Friedrich Pfaff.

In mathematics, more specifically in group theory, the character of a group representation is a function on the group that associates to each group element the trace of the corresponding matrix. The character carries the essential information about the representation in a more condensed form. Georg Frobenius initially developed representation theory of finite groups entirely based on the characters, and without any explicit matrix realization of representations themselves. This is possible because a complex representation of a finite group is determined by its character. The situation with representations over a field of positive characteristic, so-called "modular representations", is more delicate, but Richard Brauer developed a powerful theory of characters in this case as well. Many deep theorems on the structure of finite groups use characters of modular representations.

In mathematics, the representation theory of the symmetric group is a particular case of the representation theory of finite groups, for which a concrete and detailed theory can be obtained. This has a large area of potential applications, from symmetric function theory to quantum chemistry studies of atoms, molecules and solids.

In mathematics, Schur polynomials, named after Issai Schur, are certain symmetric polynomials in n variables, indexed by partitions, that generalize the elementary symmetric polynomials and the complete homogeneous symmetric polynomials. In representation theory they are the characters of polynomial irreducible representations of the general linear groups. The Schur polynomials form a linear basis for the space of all symmetric polynomials. Any product of Schur polynomials can be written as a linear combination of Schur polynomials with non-negative integral coefficients; the values of these coefficients is given combinatorially by the Littlewood–Richardson rule. More generally, skew Schur polynomials are associated with pairs of partitions and have similar properties to Schur polynomials.

In mathematics, Molien's formula computes the generating function attached to a linear representation of a group G on a finite-dimensional vector space, that counts the homogeneous polynomials of a given total degree that are invariants for G. It is named for Theodor Molien.

In linear algebra, the Laplace expansion, named after Pierre-Simon Laplace, also called cofactor expansion, is an expression of the determinant of an n × n-matrix B as a weighted sum of minors, which are the determinants of some (n − 1) × (n − 1)-submatrices of B. Specifically, for every i, the Laplace expansion along the ith row is the equality

In mathematics, the Weyl character formula in representation theory describes the characters of irreducible representations of compact Lie groups in terms of their highest weights. It was proved by Hermann Weyl. There is a closely related formula for the character of an irreducible representation of a semisimple Lie algebra. In Weyl's approach to the representation theory of connected compact Lie groups, the proof of the character formula is a key step in proving that every dominant integral element actually arises as the highest weight of some irreducible representation. Important consequences of the character formula are the Weyl dimension formula and the Kostant multiplicity formula.

In mathematics, especially linear algebra, the exchange matrices are special cases of permutation matrices, where the 1 elements reside on the antidiagonal and all other elements are zero. In other words, they are 'row-reversed' or 'column-reversed' versions of the identity matrix.

In mathematics, the Schur orthogonality relations, which were proven by Issai Schur through Schur's lemma, express a central fact about representations of finite groups. They admit a generalization to the case of compact groups in general, and in particular compact Lie groups, such as the rotation group SO(3).

In mathematics, Kronecker coefficientsgλμν describe the decomposition of the tensor product of two irreducible representations of a symmetric group into irreducible representations. They play an important role algebraic combinatorics and geometric complexity theory. They were introduced by Murnaghan in 1938.

In combinatorial mathematics, the hook length formula is a formula for the number of standard Young tableaux whose shape is a given Young diagram. It has applications in diverse areas such as representation theory, probability, and algorithm analysis; for example, the problem of longest increasing subsequences. A related formula gives the number of semi-standard Young tableaux, which is a specialization of a Schur polynomial.

This is a glossary of representation theory in mathematics.

Gamas's theorem is a result in multilinear algebra which states the necessary and sufficient conditions for a tensor symmetrized by an irreducible representation of the symmetric group to be zero. It was proven in 1988 by Carlos Gamas. Additional proofs have been given by Pate and Berget.

References