Combinatorial algorithms for the expansion of various products of Schur functions (Q1813598)

This survey article is concerned with doing calculations with Schur functions. Section 1 describes Young's construction of idempotents in the group algebra of the symmetric group, and five well-known bases of the space of homogeneous symmetric polynomials, including the basis which consists of Schur functions. The second section introduces the Frobenius map which connects symmetric polynomials with the symmetric group and relates various ways of combining Schur functions to computations with symmetric groups. The remaining sections explore, in turn, variations on the Littlewood-Richardson rule for multiplying Schur functions, methods for calculating inner tensor products of characters of the symmetric group, and techniques for working out plethysms of Schur functions. The article supplies a useful summary of known algorithms for performing these tasks.