Talk:Ring of symmetric functions

Overlap

Header added. —Nils von Barth (nbarth) (talk) 17:46, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

I suggest this article needs work. The topic overlaps heavily the article "Symmetric polynomial". I think there's room for an article on symmetric functions used in theory of equations (properties of polynomials), but the part that's theory of symmetric polynomials should be mostly cut (and added to "Symmetric polynomial" if necessary). Also, the writing could be improved. There is some highly advanced technical detail hinted at, that seems to belong in other articles, or at most, as remarks at the end of this article. On the other hand, the more elementary concepts could be explained more fully. I will do some work on articles in this area, but not enough. Zaslav 07:52, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree that his article heavily overlaps with the symmetric polynomial article; I would even say that almost everything in this article belongs there. Given that the article hasn't changed for about a year now, I propose to thoroughly redo it in a direction that is currently not even hinted at, but which I consider important: that of the ring of symmetric functions, which is a certain limit of the rings of symmetric polynomials where the number of indeterminates goes to infinity. This is the sense in which the term is used in the title of Macdonald's book. In the process I will if necessary either adapt the present contents to that context (remove the dependency on the number of variables) or move it to Symmetric polynomial, if it is not already there. Marc van Leeuwen (talk) 19:26, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Agreed – I’ve moved the article to “Ring of symmetric functions” and narrowed its scope to that, while making a separate “Symmetric functions” article for general properties.

—Nils von Barth (nbarth) (talk) 17:46, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Ring of functions

There's this article, and a ring of polynomial functions but no ring of functions. Can someone create that? That makes it hard to define what an operator product algebra is ... (its like an operator product expansion but more formally defined.)67.198.37.16 (talk) 18:56, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Unclear statement

In the first way to define the ring of symmetric functions, "As a ring of formal power series", the second condition (Condition 2.) is that the degrees of the monomials allowed in one element must be bounded.

The explanation for this condition is given as follows:

"Note that because of the second condition, power series are used here only to allow infinitely many terms of a fixed degree, rather than to sum terms of all possible degrees. Allowing this is necessary because an element that contains for instance a term X₁ should also contain a term X_i for every i > 1 in order to be symmetric."

I do not understand why Condition 2. is "necessary", as the second sentence claims. Yes, it is clear that "an element that contains for instance a term X₁ should also contain a term X_i for every i > 1 in order to be symmetric" — but what does this have to do with Condition 2. ???

Obviously, the subring of formal power series in infinitely many indeterminates X_i defined solely by Condition 1. — which requires that they are unchanged by the action of the permutation group S(ℕ₀) of the nonnegative integers ℕ₀ on the indices — makes perfect sense. So this defines a subring that does not require Condition 2.

So: Can someone who is knowledgeable in this subject please explain what goal is accomplished by also requiring Condition 2. ???

And: There must be a name for the subring that satisfies Condition 1. alone. What is its name? In my opinion this subring should also be discussed here — at least a little bit! Daqu (talk) 01:52, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Condition 2 is necessary to define the usual concept of 'symmetric function'! If we leave it out, a lot of important theorems are no longer true, e.g. number 2 in the list of 'basic properties:

# Λ_R is isomorphic as a graded R-algebra to a polynomial ring R[Y₁,Y₂, ...] in infinitely many variables, where Y_i is given degree i for all i > 0, one isomorphism being the one that sends Y_i to e_i ∈ Λ_R for every i.

The point is that if we drop condition 2 we are allowing new elements in our ring, like e₀ + e₁ + e₂ + $\cdots$

"There must be a name for the subring that satisfies Condition 1. alone." I don't know a name for it, and the only thing I know to say about it is that it's larger than the ring of symmetric functions. - John Baez (talk)

Complete (homogeneous) symmetric functions

I think here and elsewhere we should change the term "complete homogeneous symmetric function" to "complete symmetric function" because:

1) This is the term Mac Donald uses in the important reference Symmetric Functions and Hall Polynomials

2) Yes, these symmetric functions are homogeneous, but so are the power sum symmetric functions and elementary symmetric functions, and this page does not put the word "homogeneous" in their names.

Is there a reason we need to keep the word "homogeneous"?

John Baez (talk) 14:29, 2 August 2024 (UTC)