Kostka number

Examples and special cases

For any partition λ, the Kostka number K_λλ is equal to 1: the unique way to fill the Young diagram of shape λ = (λ₁, λ₂, ..., λ_m) with λ₁ copies of 1, λ₂ copies of 2, and so on, so that the resulting tableau is weakly increasing along rows and strictly increasing along columns is if all the 1s are placed in the first row, all the 2s are placed in the second row, and so on. (This tableau is sometimes called the Yamanouchi tableau of shape λ.)

The Kostka number K_λμ is positive (i.e., there exist semistandard Young tableaux of shape λ and weight μ) if and only if λ and μ are both partitions of the same integer n and λ is larger than μ in dominance order.

In general, there are no nice formulas known for the Kostka numbers. However, some special cases are known. For example, if μ = (1, 1, 1, ..., 1) is the partition whose parts are all 1 then a semistandard Young tableau of weight μ is a standard Young tableau; the number of standard Young tableaux of a given shape λ is given by the hook-length formula.

Properties

An important simple property of Kostka numbers is that K_λμ does not depend on the order of entries of μ. For example, K_{(3, 2) (1, 1, 2, 1)} = K_{(3, 2) (1, 1, 1, 2)}. This is not immediately obvious from the definition but can be shown by establishing a bijection between the sets of semistandard Young tableaux of shape λ and weights μ and μ', where μ and μ' differ only by swapping two entries.

Kostka numbers, symmetric functions and representation theory

In addition to the purely combinatorial definition above, they can also be defined as the coefficients that arise when one expresses the Schur polynomial s_λ as a linear combination of monomial symmetric functions m_μ:

s λ = ∑ μ K λ μ m μ ,

where λ and μ are both partitions of n. Alternatively, Schur polynomials can also be expressed as

s λ = ∑ α K λ α x α ,

where the sum is over all weak compositions α of n and x^α denotes the monomial x₁^α₁⋯x_n^α_n.

Because of the connections between symmetric function theory and representation theory, Kostka numbers also express the decomposition of the permutation module M_μ in terms of the representations V_λ corresponding to the character s_λ, i.e.,

M μ = ⨁ λ K λ μ V λ .

On the level of representations of the general linear group G L n ( C ) , the Kostka number K_λμ counts the dimension of the weight space corresponding to μ in the irreducible representation V_λ (where we require μ and λ to have at most n parts).

Examples

The Kostka numbers for partitions of size at most 3 are as follows:

K_{(0) (0)} = 1 (here (0) represents the empty partition) K_{(1) (1)} = 1 K_{(2) (2)} = K_{(2) (1,1)} = K_{(1,1) (1,1)} = 1, K_{(1,1) (2)} = 0. K_{(3) (3)} = K_{(3) (2,1)} = K_{(3) (1,1,1)} = 1 K_{(2,1) (3)} = 0, K_{(2,1) (2,1)} = 1, K_{(2,1) (1,1,1)} = 2 K_{(1,1,1) (3)} = K_{(1,1,1) (2,1)} = 0, K_{(1,1,1) (1,1,1)} = 1

These values are exactly the coefficients in the expansions of Schur functions in terms of monomial symmetric functions:

s = m = 1 (indexed by the empty partition) s₁ = m₁ s₂ = m₂ + m₁₁ s₁₁ = m₁₁ s₃ = m₃ + m₂₁ + m₁₁₁ s₂₁ = m₂₁ + 2m₁₁₁ s₁₁₁ = m_111.

Kostka (1882, pages 118-120) gave tables of these numbers for partitions of numbers up to 8.

Generalizations

Kostka numbers are special values of the 1 or 2 variable Kostka polynomials:

K λ μ = K λ μ ( 1 ) = K λ μ ( 0 , 1 ) .