Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
In 1911, Schur published a rather formidable paper [9] in which he determined all the complex projective characters for the symmetric group (denoted Σn here, despite the title), and for the alternating group An (A pronounced “alpha”). As far as we know, the construction of the modules involved is still an unsolved problem. The results of Schur can be expressed in terms of certain induced representations whose characters form a basis for the group of virtual characters, plus formulae expressing the irreducible characters in terms of these induced characters. Here we give a new formulation of the above induced characters in the spirit of the well known “induction algebra” approach to the linear representations of Σn. We use some Hopf algebra techniques inspired by [5] to give new proofs of Schur's results, and to determine the extra structure which we define.