This article gives a combinatorial proof of a plethystic generalization of the Murnaghan--Nakayama rule. The main result expresses the product of a Schur function with the plethysm $p_r \circ h_n$ as an integral linear combination of Schur functions. The proof uses a sign-reversing involution on sequences of bead moves on James' abacus, inspired by the arguments in N. Loehr, Abacus proofs of Schur function identities, SIAM J. Discrete Math. 24 (2010), 1356-1370.
We give a combinatorial proof of a natural generalization of the Murnaghan-Nakayama rule to loop Schur functions. We also define shifted loop Schur functions and prove that they satisfy a similar relation.
We prove a Murnaghan-Nakayama rule for the noncommutative Schur functions introduced by Bessenrodt, Luoto and van Willigenburg. In other words, we give an explicit combinatorial formula for expanding the product of a noncommutative power sum symmetric function and a noncommutative Schur function in terms of noncommutative Schur functions. In direct analogy to the classical Murnaghan-Nakayama rule, the summands are computed using a noncommutative analogue of border strips, and have coefficients equal to 1 or -1 determined by the height of these border strips. The rule is proved by interpreting …
In this paper, we extend recent results of Assaf and McNamara on skew Pieri rule and skew Murnaghan-Nakayama rule to a more general identity, which gives an elegant expansion of the product of a skew Schur function with a quantum power sum function in terms of skew Schur functions. We give two proofs, one completely bijective in the spirit of Assaf-McNamara's original proof, and one via Lam-Lauve-Sotille's skew Littlewood-Richardson rule. We end with some conjectures for skew rules for Hall-Littlewood polynomials.
We prove the Murgnaghan--Nakayama rule for $k$-Schur functions of Lapointe and Morse, that is, we give an explicit formula for the expansion of the product of a power sum symmetric function and a $k$-Schur function in terms of $k$-Schur functions. This is proved using the noncommutative $k$-Schur functions in terms of the nilCoxeter algebra introduced by Lam and the affine analogue of noncommutative symmetric functions of Fomin and Greene.
We develop Pieri type as well as Murnaghan--Nakayama type formulas for equivariant Chern--Schwartz--MacPherson classes of Schubert cells in the classical flag variety. These formulas include as special cases many previously known multiplication formulas for Chern--Schwartz--MacPherson classes or Schubert classes. We apply the equivariant Murnaghan--Nakayama formula to the enumeration of rim hook tableaux.
The Murnaghan-Nakayama rule expresses the product of a Schur function with a Newton power sum in the basis of Schur functions. We establish a version of the Murnaghan-Nakayama rule for Schubert polynomials and a version for the quantum cohomology ring of the Grassmannian. These rules compute all intersections of Schubert cycles with tautological classes coming from the Chern character.
Lusztig's fake degree is the generating polynomial for the major index of standard Young tableaux of a given shape. Results of Springer and James & Kerber imply that, mysteriously, its evaluation at a $k$-th primitive root of unity yields the number of border strip tableaux with all strips of size $k$, up to sign. This is essentially the special case of the Murnaghan-Nakayama rule for evaluating an irreducible character of the symmetric group at a rectangular partition. We refine this result to standard Young tableaux and border strip tableaux with a given number of descents. To do so, we intr…
The Murnaghan--Nakayama rule is a combinatorial rule for the character values of symmetric groups. We give a new combinatorial proof by explicitly finding the trace of the representing matrices in the standard basis of Specht modules. This gives an essentially bijective proof of the rule. A key lemma is an extension of a straightening result proved by the second author to skew-tableaux. Our module theoretic methods also give short proofs of Pieri's rule and Young's rule.
Given natural numbers m and n, we define a deflation map from the characters of the symmetric group S_{mn} to the characters of S_n. This map is obtained by first restricting a character of S_{mn} to the wreath product S_m \wr S_n, and then taking the sum of the irreducible constituents of the restricted character on which the base group S_m \times ... \times S_m acts trivially. We prove a combinatorial formula which gives the values of the images of the irreducible characters of S_{mn} under this map. We also prove an analogous result for more general deflation maps in which the base group is…
The $(p,q,n)$-dipole problem is a map enumeration problem, arising in perturbative Yang-Mills theory, in which the parameters $p$ and $q$, at each vertex, specify the number of edges separating of two distinguished edges. Combinatorially, it is notable for being a permutation factorization problem which does not lie in the centre of $\mathbb{C}[\mathfrak{S}_n]$, rendering the problem inaccessible through the character theoretic methods often employed to study such problems. This paper gives a solution to this problem on all orientable surfaces when $q=n-1$, which is a combinatorially significa…
The Murnaghan-Nakayama rule is the classical formula for computing the character table of S_n. Y. Roichman has recently discovered a rule for the Kazhdan-Lusztig characters of q-Hecke algebras of type A, which can also be used for the character table of S_n. For each of the two rules, we give an algorithm for computing entries in the character table of S_n. We then analyze the computational complexity of the two algorithms, and in the case of characters indexed by partitions in the (k,l)-hook, compare their complexities to each other. It turns out that the algorithm based on the Murnaghan-Naka…
Lam and Pylyavskyy introduced loop symmetric functions as a generalization of symmetric functions. They defined loop Schur functions as generating functions over semistandard tableaux with respect to a `colored weight,' and they proved a Jacobi--Trudi-style determinantal formula for these generating functions. We prove that loop Schur functions can be expressed as a ratio of `loop alternants,' extending the analogy with Schur functions. As an application, we give a new proof of the loop version of the Murnaghan--Nakayama rule.
Recently, residue and quotient tables were defined by Fishel and the author, and were used to describe strong covers in the lattice of $k$-bounded partitions. In this paper, we show or conjecture that residue and quotient tables can be used to describe many other results in the theory of $k$-bounded partitions and $k$-Schur functions, including $k$-conjugates, weak horizontal and vertical strips, and the Murnaghan-Nakayama rule. Evidence is presented for the claim that one of the most important open questions in the theory of $k$-Schur functions, a general rule that would describe their produc…
We discuss several well known results about Schur functions that can be proved using cancellations in alternating summations; notably we shall discuss the Pieri and Murnaghan-Nakayama rules, the Jacobi-Trudi identity and its dual (Von N{ä}gelsbach-Kostka) identity, their proofs using the correspondence with lattice paths of Gessel and Viennot, and finally the Littlewood-Richardson rule. Our our goal is to show that the mentioned statements are closely related, and can be proved using variations of the same basic technique. We also want to emphasise the central part that is played by matrices o…
Our results can be viewed as applications of algebraic combinatorics in random matrix theory. These applications are motivated by the predictive power of random matrix theory for the statistical behavior of the celebrated Riemann $ζ$-function (and $L$-functions in general), which was discovered by Montgomery (with regard to zeros of $L$-functions) and by Keating and Snaith (with regard to values of $L$-functions). The first results revolve around a new operation on partitions, which we call overlap. We prove two overlap identities for so-called Littlewood-Schur functions. The first overlap ide…
