Symmetric Functions And Hall Polynomials

This reissued classic text is the acclaimed second edition of Professor Ian Macdonald's groundbreaking monograph on symmetric functions and Hall polynomials. The first edition was published in 1979, before being significantly expanded into the present edition in 1995. This text is widely regarded as the best source of information on Hall polynomials and what have come to be known as Macdonald polynomials, central to a number of key developments in mathematics and mathematical physics in the 21st century Macdonald polynomials gave rise to the subject of double affine Hecke algebras (or Cherednik algebras) important in representation theory. String theorists use Macdonald polynomials to attack the so-called AGT conjectures. Macdonald polynomials have been recently used to construct knot invariants. They are also a central tool for a theory of integrable stochastic models that have found a number of applications in probability, such as random matrices, directed polymers in random media, driven lattice gases, and so on. Macdonald polynomials have become a part of basic material that a researcher simply must know if (s)he wants to work in one of the above domains, ensuring this new edition will appeal to a very broad mathematical audience. Featuring a new foreword by Professor Richard Stanley of MIT.

One of the most classical areas of algebra, the theory of symmetric functions and orthogonal polynomials, has long been known to be connected to combinatorics, representation theory and other branches of mathematics. Written by perhaps the most famous author on the topic, this volume explains some of the current developments regarding these connections. It is based on lectures presented by the author at Rutgers University. Specifically, he gives recent results on orthogonal polynomials associated with affine Hecke algebras, surveying the proofs of certain famous combinatorial conjectures.

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.

This work contains detailed descriptions of developments in the combinatorics of the space of diagonal harmonics, a topic at the forefront of current research in algebraic combinatorics. These developments have led in turn to some surprising discoveries in the combinatorics of Macdonald polynomials.

This work presents foundational research on two approaches to studying subgroup lattices of finite abelian $p$-groups. The first approach is linear algebraic in nature and generalizes Knuth's study of subspace lattices. This approach yields a combinatorial interpretation of the Betti polynomials of these Cohen-Macaulay posets. The second approach, which employs Hall-Littlewood symmetric functions, exploits properties of Kostka polynomials to obtain enumerative results such as rank-unimodality. Butler completes Lascoux and Schutzenberger's proof that Kostka polynomials are nonnegative, then discusses their monotonicity result and a conjecture on Macdonald's two-variable Kostka functions.

This book brings together many of the important results in this field. From the reviews: ""A classic gets even better....The edition has new material including the Novelli-Pak-Stoyanovskii bijective proof of the hook formula, Stanley’s proof of the sum of squares formula using differential posets, Fomin’s bijective proof of the sum of squares formula, group acting on posets and their use in proving unimodality, and chromatic symmetric functions." --ZENTRALBLATT MATH

A function containing several variables that remains unchanged for any permutation of the variables is called a symmetric function. Polynomials are a type of function. A symmetric polynomial refers to a type of polynomial P in n variables such that if any of the variables are swapped with each other, it remains the same polynomial. There are various types of symmetric polynomials including power-sum symmetric polynomials, elementary symmetric polynomials, complete homogeneous symmetric polynomials, monomial symmetric polynomials, and Schur polynomials. Symmetric polynomials have numerous applications in various areas of combinatorics, representation theory, mathematical physics, and mathematics. They are frequently found in Newton's identities and Vieta's formula. This book includes some of the vital pieces of works being conducted across the world, on various topics related to symmetric functions and polynomials, and their applications. It will serve as a valuable source of reference for graduate and postgraduate students.

We describe a method, based on the theory of Macdonald–Koornwinder polynomials, for proving bounded Littlewood identities. Our approach provides an alternative to Macdonald’s partial fraction technique and results in the first examples of bounded Littlewood identities for Macdonald polynomials. These identities, which take the form of decomposition formulas for Macdonald polynomials of type (R, S) in terms of ordinary Macdonald polynomials, are q, t-analogues of known branching formulas for characters of the symplectic, orthogonal and special orthogonal groups. In the classical limit, our method implies that MacMahon’s famous ex-conjecture for the generating function of symmetric plane partitions in a box follows from the identification of GL(n, R), O(n) as a Gelfand pair. As further applications, we obtain combinatorial formulas for characters of affine Lie algebras; Rogers–Ramanujan identities for affine Lie algebras, complementing recent results of Griffin et al.; and quadratic transformation formulas for Kaneko–Macdonald-type basic hypergeometric series.