TITLE:  Products of characters of the symmetric group

ABSTRACT:  One of the main open problems in combinatorial representation theory of the symmetric group is to obtain a combinatorial interpretation for what are known as the Kronecker coefficients.  The Kronecker coefficients are obtained when we decompose the tensor product of two irreducible representations of the symmetric group. This talk will be an introduction to Kronecker coefficients and a survey of recent results.   This presentation should be accessible to beginning graduate students and will not assume knowledge of representation theory.

Rosa Orellana is Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth College.  She earned her B.A. from California State University, Los Angeles, and her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, San Diego. She was the first person in her family to receive a college degree. Originally interested in knot theory as it arises in mathematical biology, her research shifted in graduate school to algebraic combinatorics and representation theory.  She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego, before joining Dartmouth in 2000.   She loves teaching and introducing students to research.