Mathematics for the interested outsider

Again, my apologies. What with yesterday’s cooking, I forgot to post this yesterday. I’ll have another in the evening.

Let be a representation of a finite group , with finite dimension . We can decompose into blocks — one for each irreducible representation of :

We’re particularly concerned with one of these blocks, which we can construct for any group . Every group has a trivial representation , and so we can always come up with the space of “invariants” of :

We call these invariants, because these are the so that for all . Technically, this is a module — actually a -submodule of — but the action of is trivial, so it feels slightly pointless to consider it as a module at all.

On the other hand, any “plain” vector space can be considered as if it were carrying the trivial action of . Indeed, if has dimension , then we can say it’s the direct sum of copies of the trivial representation. Since the trivial character takes the constant value , the character of this representation takes the constant value . And so it really does make sense to consider it as the “number” , just like we’ve been doing.

We’ve actually already seen this sort of subspace before. Given two left -modules and , we can set up the space of linear maps between the underlying vector spaces. In this setup, the two group actions are extraneous, and so we find that they give residual actions on the space of linear maps. That is we have two actions by on , one from the left and one from the right.

Now just like we found with inner tensor products, we can combine these two actions of into one. Now we have one left action of on linear maps by conjugation: , defined by

Just in case, we check that

so this is, indeed, a representation. And what are the invariants of this representation? They’re exactly those linear maps such that

About this weblog

This is mainly an expository blath, with occasional high-level excursions, humorous observations, rants, and musings. The main-line exposition should be accessible to the “Generally Interested Lay Audience”, as long as you trace the links back towards the basics. Check the sidebar for specific topics (under “Categories”).

I’m in the process of tweaking some aspects of the site to make it easier to refer back to older topics, so try to make the best of it for now.