A permutation is a bijective function from a set to itself.
Let be a finite set. The function is called a permutation if and only if it is one-to-one and onto.
Meaning, for all there exists a unique such that .
The set of all permutations of the elements of is denoted by .
For there are different permutations:
In general, if then .
Let be a polynomial. Let us define:
Let be polynomials. Then we have:
- such that .
- By definition, the permutation is applied on the variable indexes only.
- First, let be monomials of the form
- We can generalize by induction for , such that are monomials.
- Same as before, let be monomials of the form
- Again, We can generalize by induction for , such that are monomials:
Let be a polynomial. Then it is called symmetric if
for all permutations .
- A non-symmetric polynomial:
- The sum and product of symmetric polynomials is a symmetric polynomial.
- Let be a polynomial in variables , and let be symmetric polynomials in variables .
- Then is also symmetric in variables .
- This follows from the properties in definition 2 and the symmetric polynomial definition above.
- By definition we get: