Download or read book The Theory of Group Characters and Matrix Representations of Groups written by Dudley Ernest Littlewood and published by American Mathematical Soc.. This book was released on 2005 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally written in 1940, this book remains a classical source on representations and characters of finite and compact groups. The book starts with necessary information about matrices, algebras, and groups. Then the author proceeds to representations of finite groups. Of particular interest in this part of the book are several chapters devoted to representations and characters of symmetric groups and the closely related theory of symmetric polynomials. The concluding chapters present the representation theory of classical compact Lie groups, including a detailed description of representations of the unitary and orthogonal groups. The book, which can be read with minimal prerequisites (an undergraduate algebra course), allows the reader to get a good understanding of beautiful classical results about group representations.