An Introduction to Symmetric Functions and Their Combinatorics

Download or read book An Introduction to Symmetric Functions and Their Combinatorics written by Eric S. Egge and published by American Mathematical Soc.. This book was released on 2019-11-18 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a reader-friendly introduction to the theory of symmetric functions, and it includes fundamental topics such as the monomial, elementary, homogeneous, and Schur function bases; the skew Schur functions; the Jacobi–Trudi identities; the involution ω ω; the Hall inner product; Cauchy's formula; the RSK correspondence and how to implement it with both insertion and growth diagrams; the Pieri rules; the Murnaghan–Nakayama rule; Knuth equivalence; jeu de taquin; and the Littlewood–Richardson rule. The book also includes glimpses of recent developments and active areas of research, including Grothendieck polynomials, dual stable Grothendieck polynomials, Stanley's chromatic symmetric function, and Stanley's chromatic tree conjecture. Written in a conversational style, the book contains many motivating and illustrative examples. Whenever possible it takes a combinatorial approach, using bijections, involutions, and combinatorial ideas to prove algebraic results. The prerequisites for this book are minimal—familiarity with linear algebra, partitions, and generating functions is all one needs to get started. This makes the book accessible to a wide array of undergraduates interested in combinatorics.