24 October 2012, 4:00-5:00pm

room 745, Malet Street

Title

Factorizations in the symmetric group and induction methods.

Abstract

We give a new method for evaluating the structure constants of the centre of the group algebra of the symmetric group.  I will begin with an introduction to characters of the symmetric group and end with an application to some recent work of Bernardi, Du, Morales and Stanley on separation probabilities for products of permutations.