Dr Chris Bowman, Reader in Mathematics at the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Actuarial Science (SMSAS), has been awarded a five-year early career fellowship worth £1,155,585 by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
Dr Bowman was awarded the fellowship for his upcoming research project on Kronecker and plethysm coefficients. Kronecker and plethysm coefficients describe the decompositions of products of symmetric functions into their simple constituents.
The Kronecker coefficients are arguably the most challenging and mysterious element in algebraic combinatorics and play an important role in the theory of symmetric functions and the representation theory of general linear and symmetric groups.
EPSRC fellowships help early and established career researchers with the greatest potential to develop world-leading research that will meet UK and global priorities.
Dr Bowman said: ‘We seek to understand quantum systems and entropies in terms of their underlying symmetries. Surprisingly, these complicated symmetries are not new at all. Over the past 100 years, pure mathematicians have studied these symmetries in terms of “Kronecker” & “plethysm” coefficients. Each “coefficient” is simply a number which tells us what a certain symmetry looks like. My proposal seeks to describe the whole blueprint for these coefficients by first considering what it looks like “generically” or “up to a finite instability”.’
Dr Chris Bowman