Asymptotics of characters of symmetric groups, genus expansion and free probability

The convolution of indicators of two conjugacy classes on the symmetric group S_q is usually a complicated linear combination of indicators of many conjugacy classes. Similarly, a product of the moments of the Jucys--Murphy element involves many conjugacy classes with complicated coefficients. In this article we consider a combinatorial setup which allows us to manipulate such products easily: to each conjugacy class we associate a two-dimensional surface and the asymptotic properties of the conjugacy class depend only on the genus of the resulting surface. This construction closely resembles the genus expansion from the random matrix theory. As the main application we study irreducible representations of symmetric groups S_q for large q. We find the asymptotic behavior of characters when the corresponding Young diagram rescaled by a factor q^{-1/2} converge to a prescribed shape. The character formula (known as the Kerov polynomial) can be viewed as a power series, the terms of which correspond to two-dimensional surfaces with prescribed genus and we compute explicitly the first two terms, thus we prove a conjecture of Biane.Comment: version 2: change of title; the section on Gaussian fluctuations was moved to a subsequent paper [Piotr Sniady: "Gaussian fluctuations of characters of symmetric groups and of Young diagrams" math.CO/0501112

Composition of Permutation Representations of Triangle Groups

A triangle group is denoted by $\Delta(p,q,r)$ and has finite presentation $$\Delta(p,q,r)=\langle x,y | x^p=y^q=(xy)^r=1 \rangle .$$ We examine a method for composition of permutation representations of a triangle group $\Delta(p,q,r)$ that was used in Everitt's proof of Higman's 1968 conjecture that every Fuchsian group has amongst its homomorphic images all but finitely many alternating groups. We see that some of these compositions must give imprimitive representations, and in particular situations, where the representations being composed are all equivalent copies of an alternating group in the same degree, we can give a complete description of the structure of the composition of the representations. This article contains the main results of the author's PhD thesis