I know everyone and their brother does a series of posts on basic representation theory, and I said I would try to avoid very overtly repeat posts of other math blogs, but I can’t help it. I don’t know representation theory very well at all, and I feel my time has come to wrestle with the beast. This is one of the main points of this blog, so may as well try.
Goal: Carefully build as slowly as I can all the way to the Artin-Wedderburn Theorem.
Beginning: What is a representation. Well, let G be a finite group and V any finite dimensional vector space over 
We have an arsenal of examples already, but probably don’t even realize it. The trivial representation is just sending every group element to the identity transformation. What I like to call the “almost trivial representation” (term my own, so don’t use this somewhere and expect people to know what you are talking about), is to embed G in 
Let’s define the group ring (aka the group algebra). Let k be a field and G a finite group. Then 
This structure will be of great importance soon, but I don’t want to throw too much out there at once. Remember, we’re going to go slowly. But if you want to think ahead, the first thing of tomorrow’s post will be that a representation equips the vector space V with the structure of a 
July 6, 2009 at 3:53 am
“We have an arsenal of examples already, but probably don’t even realize it. The trivial representation is just sending every group element to the identity transformation. What I like to call the “almost trivial representation” (term my own, so don’t use this somewhere and expect people to know what you are talking about), is to embed G in S_n for some large n, which we know is possible. Then under this embedding, a group element is either even or odd. If it is even, send it to the identity transformation. If it is odd, send it to the negative identity transformation. Probably a better way to say this is: a representation of S_n is, \phi(x)=sgn(x)1_V. ”
But strictly speaking, we don’t know that this is different from the trivial representation, and even if it is, it’s not functorial because the embedding G->S_n is noncanonical. One could generalize this: given a homomorphism G->H, there is a functor Rep(H)->Rep(G).
July 8, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Is it even obvious that the “almost trivial representation” is unique? One could imagine a group with two embeddings into S_n (for n minimal) related by an outer automorphism in which different group elements get called even or odd.
July 8, 2009 at 8:04 pm
Maybe I should switch the “the” to an “an”? I did not expect such a fuss over this. This was the point of Zygmund, “…the embedding G ->S_n is noncanonical”. I just wanted another representation, I didn’t need it to be nice or canonical or unique. Maybe I should have just posted something more standard…
July 9, 2009 at 12:23 pm
I was just actually looking at an example of this phenomenon. Say
is a subgroup of a finite group 
. If 
is a representation of 
, then 
is a representation of 
, for 
.
This representation can be written in a form resembling the discussion above. The representation
is isomorphic to the representation 
given by mapping 
to 
.
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