Related papers: The probability that a character value is zero for…

Consider a group G such that there is no homomorphism f:G to {+1,-1}. In that case, how close can we come to such a homomorphism? We show that if f has zero expectation, then the probability that f(xy) = f(x) f(y), where x, y are chosen…

We present the results of computer experiments suggesting that the probability that a random multiword in a free group is virtually geometric decays to zero exponentially quickly in the length of the multiword. We then prove this fact.

We give a complete list of indecomposable characters of the infinite symmetric semigroup. In comparison with the analogous list for the infinite symmetric group, one should introduce only one new parameter, which has a clear combinatorial…

A conjugacy class $C$ of a finite group $G$ is a sign conjugacy class if every irreducible character of $G$ takes value 0, 1 or -1 on $C$. In this paper we classify the sign conjugacy classes of the symmetric groups and thereby verify a…

The branching theorem expresses irreducible character values for the symmetric group $S_n$ in terms of those for $S_{n-1}$, but it gives the values only at elements of $S_n$ having a fixed point. We extend the theorem by providing a…

Let $X$ be an irreducible shift of finite type (SFT) of positive entropy, and let $B_n(X)$ be its set of words of length $n$. Define a random subset $\omega$ of $B_n(X)$ by independently choosing each word from $B_n(X)$ with some…

Let \chi be an irreducible character of the finite group G. If g is an element of G and \chi(g) is not zero, then we conjecture that the order of g divides |G|/\chi(1). The conjecture is a generalization of the classical fact that…

Let $G$ be a finite group. Let $X_1(G)$ be the first column of the ordinary character table of $G.$ In this paper, we will show that if $X_1(G)=X_1(S_n),$ then $G\cong S_n.$ As a consequence, we show that $S_n$ is uniquely determined by the…

Let $\mu$ be a probability measure on $\mathbb{Z}$ that is not a Dirac mass and that has finite support. We prove that if the coefficients of a monic polynomial $f(x)\in\mathbb{Z}[x]$ of degree $n$ are chosen independently at random…

The irreducible character values of the spin wreath products of the symmetric group and an arbitrary finite group are completely determined.

Consider a polynomial of large degree n whose coefficients are independent, identically distributed, nondegenerate random variables having zero mean and finite moments of all orders. We show that such a polynomial has exactly k real zeros…

We study the probability of a given element, in the commutator subgroup of a group, to be equal to a commutator of two randomly chosen group elements, and compute explicit formulas for calculating this probability for some interesting…

Let g_0(N) be the genus of the modular curve X_0(N). We record several properties of the sequence {g_0(N)}. Even though the average size of g_0(N) is 1.25N/pi^2, a random positive integer has probability zero of being a value of g_0(N).…

The characters $\chi(\pi)$ of $S_n$ that depend only on the number of cycles of $\pi$ are completely determined.

We use an information-theoretic argument due to O'Connell (2000) to prove that every sufficiently symmetric event concerning a countably infinite family of independent and identically distributed random variables is deterministic (i.e., has…

We say that a random integer variable $X$ is monotone if the modulus of the characteristic function of $X$ is decreasing on $[0,\pi]$. This is the case for many commonly encountered variables, e.g., Bernoulli, Poisson and geometric random…

Given a finite group $G$, we denote by $\nu(G)$ the probability that two randomly chosen elements of $G$ generate a nilpotent subgroup. We prove that if $\nu(G)>1/12,$ then $G$ is solvable.

We study n by n symmetric random matrices H, possibly discrete, with iid above-diagonal entries. We show that H is singular with probability at most exp(-n^c), and the spectral norm of the inverse of H is O(sqrt{n}). Furthermore, the…

Let $N$ be a normal subgroup of a finite group $G$. In this paper, we consider the elements $g$ of $N$ such that $\chi(g)\neq 0$ for all irreducible characters $\chi$ of $G$. Such an element is said to be non-vanishing in $G$. Let $p$ be a…

We investigate the number of symmetric matrices of non-negative integers with zero diagonal such that each row sum is the same. Equivalently, these are zero diagonal symmetric contingency tables with uniform margins, or loop-free regular…