II.3.

2 May 7, 2020 Peter Daniel Johannsen

We would like to show that the defining representation of Sn , when it breaks up, always contains the identity repre-
sentation. The identity representation will always have character χ (c) = 1, ∀c. The defining representation of the
Sn is given by n × n matrices, whose trace is given by the number of fixed points, which definitely is non-negative.
Additionally we have that χ (id) = n. Now we would like to use
∑
nc χ ∗(r ) (c)χ (c) = N (G)n r (1)
c

where we use χ to the characters of the defining representation, and χ (r ) to be the characters of the identity representa-
tion, hence n r will tell us how often the identity representation is contained in the defining representation. But we have
already argued that all the terms in the sum are non-negative and that there is at least one term that is positive, hence
the entire sum is greater than zero. This implies that the identity representation is always contained in the defining
representation of Sn at least once.

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