In mathematics

Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

, a character is (most commonly) a special kind of function

Function (mathematics)

In mathematics, a function associates one quantity, the argument of the function, also known as the input, with another quantity, the value of the function, also known as the output. A function assigns exactly one output to each input. The argument and the value may be real numbers, but they can...

 from a group

Group (mathematics)

In mathematics, a group is an algebraic structure consisting of a set together with an operation that combines any two of its elements to form a third element. To qualify as a group, the set and the operation must satisfy a few conditions called group axioms, namely closure, associativity, identity...

 to a field

Field (mathematics)

In abstract algebra, a field is a commutative ring whose nonzero elements form a group under multiplication. As such it is an algebraic structure with notions of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, satisfying certain axioms...

 (such as the complex numbers). There are at least two distinct, but overlapping meanings. Other uses of the word "character" are almost always qualified.

Multiplicative character

A multiplicative character (or linear character, or simply character) on a group G is a group homomorphism

Group homomorphism

In mathematics, given two groups and , a group homomorphism from to is a function h : G → H such that for all u and v in G it holds that h = h \cdot h...

 from G to the multiplicative group of a field , usually the field of complex numbers. If G is any group, then the set Ch(G) of these morphisms forms an abelian group

Abelian group

In abstract algebra, an abelian group, also called a commutative group, is a group in which the result of applying the group operation to two group elements does not depend on their order . Abelian groups generalize the arithmetic of addition of integers...

 under pointwise multiplication.

This group is referred to as the character group

Character group

In mathematics, a character group is the group of representations of a group by complex-valued functions. These functions can be thought of as one-dimensional matrix representations and so are special cases of the group characters which arises in the related context of character theory...

 of G. Sometimes only unitary characters are considered (thus the image is in the unit circle

Unit circle

In mathematics, a unit circle is a circle with a radius of one. Frequently, especially in trigonometry, "the" unit circle is the circle of radius one centered at the origin in the Cartesian coordinate system in the Euclidean plane...

); other such homomorphisms are then called quasi-characters. Dirichlet character

Dirichlet character

In number theory, Dirichlet characters are certain arithmetic functions which arise from completely multiplicative characters on the units of \mathbb Z / k \mathbb Z...

s can be seen as a special case of this definition.

Character of a representation

The character of a representation φ of a group G on a finite-dimensional vector space V over a field F is the trace of the representation

Group representation

In the mathematical field of representation theory, group representations describe abstract groups in terms of linear transformations of vector spaces; in particular, they can be used to represent group elements as matrices so that the group operation can be represented by matrix multiplication...

 φ. In general, the trace is not a group homomorphism, nor does the set of traces form a group. The characters of one-dimensional representations are identical to one-dimensional representations, so the above notion of multiplicative character can be seen as a special case of higher dimensional characters. The study of representations using characters is called "character theory

Character theory

In mathematics, more specifically in group theory, the character of a group representation is a function on the group which associates to each group element the trace of the corresponding matrix....

" and one dimensional characters are also called "linear characters" within this context.

See also

• Dirichlet character
  Dirichlet character
  In number theory, Dirichlet characters are certain arithmetic functions which arise from completely multiplicative characters on the units of \mathbb Z / k \mathbb Z...
  
  
• Harish-Chandra character
  Harish-Chandra character
  In mathematics, the Harish-Chandra character, named after Harish-Chandra, of a representation of a semisimple Lie group G on a Hilbert space H is a distribution on the group G that is analogous to the character of a finite dimensional representation of a compact group.-Definition:Suppose that π...
  
  
• Hecke character
  Hecke character
  In number theory, a Hecke character is a generalisation of a Dirichlet character, introduced by Erich Hecke to construct a class ofL-functions larger than Dirichlet L-functions, and a natural setting for the Dedekind zeta-functions and certain others which have functional equations analogous to...
  
  
• Infinitesimal character
  Infinitesimal character
  In mathematics, the infinitesimal character of an irreducible representation ρ of a semisimple Lie group G on a vector space V is, roughly speaking, a mapping to scalars that encodes the process of first differentiating and then diagonalizing the representation...
  
  
• Alternating character