On Foulkes characters

Abstract

Orthogonality relations for Foulkes characters of full monomial groups are presented, along with three solutions to the problem of decomposing products of these characters, and new applications, including a product reformulation of a Markov chain for adding random numbers studied by Diaconis and Fulman, and a new proof of a theorem of Zagier which generalizes one of Harer and Zagier on the enumeration of Riemann surfaces of a given genus.