# The Cali Garmo

does Math

## Symmetric functions

By Cali G, Published on Mon 13 January 2020
Category: Symmetric functions

Symmetric functions are polynomials such that when we permute the indices of the polynomial we get the same polynomial. Symmetric functions have some interesting combinatorics which will be looked out throughout this blog, but for now let's look at the exact definition.

Suppose we have a set of infinitely many variables. For some ring let be the ring of all polynomials with variables in and coefficients in .

Definitions: Let be a permutation in and be a monomial in . We can apply to the indices of in the following way: and we call this a permutation of the indices of . A symmetric function is a polynomial in such that any permutation of the indices keeps invariant. The set of all symmetric functions together with normal addition and multiplication give us the ring of symmetric functions in variables which we denote by .

We can further look at vector subspaces of . Let . Then is the vector subspace of whose symmetric functions are functions of degree .

### Bases of

There are many different bases that can be associated to . These are normally done through partitions. Recall that a partition of is such that . A lot of times, we use Young diagrams to represent a partition.

#### Monomial Symmetric Functions

Definition: A monomial symmetric function is a symmetric function in such that: If there is no ambiguity for , we let mean .

Let us look at some monomial symmetric functions:

#### Elementary Symmetric Functions

Definition: An elementary symmetric function is the symmetric function .

It turns out there is a nice way to reformulate the elementary symmetric functions

Theorem Let be some variable.

Proof The proof for this is pretty simple:

#### Power Symmetric Functions

Definition: A power symmetric function is the symmetric function .

As an example

#### Complete Homogeneous Symmetric Functions

Definition: A complete homogeneous symmetric function is the symmetric function . If is a partition of then is defined to be the complete homogeneous symmetric function:

As an example, let's look at .

Theorem Let be some variable.

Proof By recalling that the proof is easy to show.