Talk:Symmetric function

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I suggest this article needs work. The topic overlaps heavily the article "Symmetric polynomial". I think there's room for an article on symmetric functions used in theory of equations (properties of polynomials), but the part that's theory of symmetric polynomials should be mostly cut (and added to "Symmetric polynomial" if necessary). Also, the writing could be improved. There is some highly advanced technical detail hinted at, that seems to belong in other articles, or at most, as remarks at the end of this article. On the other hand, the more elementary concepts could be explained more fully. I will do some work on articles in this area, but not enough. Zaslav 07:52, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree that his article heavily overlaps with the symmetric polynomial article; I would even say that almost everything in this article belongs there. Given that the article hasn't changed for about a year now, I propose to thoroughly redo it in a direction that is currently not even hinted at, but which I consider important: that of the ring of symmetric functions, which is a certain limit of the rings of symmetric polynomials where the number of indeterminates goes to infinity. This is the sense in which the term is used in the title of Macdonald's book. In the process I will if necessary either adapt the present contents to that context (remove the dependency on the number of variables) or move it to Symmetric polynomial, if it is not already there. Marc van Leeuwen (talk) 19:26, 22 March 2008 (UTC)