Dr Chris Bowman awarded EPSRC early career fellowship

kronecker and plethysm coefficients

Congratulations to Dr Chris Bowman, Reader in Mathematics at SMSAS, who has been awarded an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) 5 year early career fellowship worth £1,155,585.

EPSRC fellowships help early and established career researchers with the greatest potential to develop world-leading research that will meet UK and global priorities.

Chris was awarded the fellowship for his research project on Kronecker and plethysm coefficients. He says: ‘The Kronecker and plethysm coefficients describe the decompositions of products of symmetric functions into their simple constituents. They are as ubiquitous across mathematics as the notion of symmetry itself. The Kronecker coefficients have been described as “perhaps the most challenging, deep and mysterious objects in algebraic combinatorics’’ and they play an important role in the theory of symmetric functions and the representation theory of general linear and symmetric groups. Despite 80 years of study, “frustratingly little is known” about these coefficients. I hope to understand the whole blueprint for these Kronecker and plethysm coefficients by first considering what they looks like “generically” or “up to a finite instability”‘.

Very many congratulations to Chris!