Talk:Character group

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[edit] More work needed for this article?

This article, although tersely written, is not advanced material. It covers a topic that is commonly taught to second and third year undergraduates, and represents maybe one or two lectures worth of material. This article, as written, should be easy to understand by anyone who has been exposed to introductory group theory. linas 05:14, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Thank you. I did not mean the contents. Complicated math is fine (in proper context). I meant the style. "Theorem, definition, theorem, theorem, definition..." looks like some text from Abramowitz and Stegun. It is good if you relax the style a bit, add some motivation, some more prose, etc. Take a look at Wikipedia: How to write a Wikipedia article on Mathematics.

By the way, you better use section headings rather than subsection headings in some places. I mean ==Section==. Oleg Alexandrov | talk 05:26, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

It might be useful to mention that the first definition of group characters is essentially the classical case of linear group representations in GL(n, C) when n = 1. This is really the way to think about it. You aren't representing the group by complex-valued functions, so much as you are representing them by 1 × 1 complex matrices, i.e. by linear maps from C to C. I understand where Oleg is coming from...the style is a bit too textbook-ish. What is already here is good, but it needs a lot more, e.g. why are characters important? Who came up with them? What problems led to their invention? etc. Also, the section on residue classes is out of place. That is not the topic of the article. If someone needs to know about them, they can be told where the appropriate article is. Revolver 06:04, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)