Room 326

Character Tables of Alternating Groups

Amritanshu Prasad

IMSc

I will explain how to compute all the values in the character table of an alternating group.

The main ingredient in the computation is the recursive Murnaghan-Nakayama formula, which also happens to be the fastest algorithm for computing a character value of the symmetric group.

Another important ingredient is the folding map, which gives a bijection from the set of partitions with distinct odd parts to the set of self-conjugate partitions.