University of Minnesota Combinatorics Seminar
Fall 2007
October 30, 4:30-5:30pm
570 Vincent Hall



Extending the coinvariant theorem of Chevalley and Shephard-Todd

Victor Reiner

University of Minnesota


Abstract

(joint work with Bram Broer, Peter Webb and Larry Smith)
The theorem in the title tells us, under certain hypotheses, how to get a very useful _graded_ version of the (ungraded) coset representation G/H for a finite group G of GL_n(k) and a subgroup H. Specifically, you take the polynomials in k[x_1,...,x_n] invariant under H, and mod out by the ideal generated by the positive degree polynomials invariant under G. The problem is that the hypotheses on the group G and the field k are quite restrictive: one needs for the G-invariants to be a polynomial algebra, and for |G| to be invertible in k. So I'll tell you how to get rid of those annoying hypotheses, that is, how the statement changes without them.