2/14 – Eric Sommers: An Introduction to Representation Theory

It was really unfortunate that we had to cancel the math club last week due to the snow. We will reschedule GaYee’s talk at some time this semester, so don’t miss it!

This week, we are happy to have Eric Sommers as a speaker. He will talk about “An Introduction to Representation Theory”.

Here is his abstract:

I’ll give a survey of the main ideas behind the representation theory of finite groups. Representation theory is the study of the ways in which a group can be represented by a set of matrices. Knowing some linear algebra (Math 235) is helpful, but not required. It is not necessary to know what a group is– I will give the definition. This is a beautiful subject, accessible to all math majors, but not something that shows up in our undergraduate curriculum (although our friends in chemistry do see it).