Alexander I. Bufetov: On the Vershik-Kerov Conjecture Concerning the Shannon-McMillan-Breiman Theorem for the Plancherel Family of Measures on the Space of Young Diagrams Part 1

Vershik and Kerov conjectured in 1985 that dimensions of irreducible representations of finite symmetric groups, after appropriate normalization, converge to a constant with respect to the Plancherel family of measures on the space of Young diagrams. The statement of the Vershik-Kerov conjecture can be seen as an analogue of the Shannon-McMillan-Breiman Theorem for the non-stationary Markov process of the growth of a Young diagram. The limiting constant is then interpreted as the entropy of the Plancherel measure. The talk, based on the preprint arXiv:1001.4275 (to appear in GAFA) will be devoted to the proof of the Vershik-Kerov conjecture. The argument is based on the methods of Borodin, Okounkov and Olshanski.