The subject of symmetric functions began with the work of Jacobi, Schur, Weyl, Young and others on the Schur polynomials. In the 1950's and 60's, far-reaching generalizations of Schur polynomials were obtained by Hall and Littlewood (independently) and, in a different direction, by Jack. In the 1980's, Macdonald unified these developments by introducing a family of polynomials associated with arbitrary root systems. The last twenty years have witnessed considerable progress in this area, revealing new and profound connections with representation theory, algebraic geometry, combinatorics, special functions, classical analysis and mathematical physics. All these fields and more are represented in this volume, which contains the proceedings of a conference on Jack, Hall-Littlewood and Macdonald polynomials held at ICMS, Edinburgh, during September 23-26, 2003. of historical material, including brief biographies of Hall, Littlewood, Jack and Macdonald; the original papers of Littlewood and Jack; notes on Hall's work by Macdonald; and a recently discovered unpublished manuscript by Jack (annotated by Macdonald). The book will be invaluable to students and researchers who wish to learn about this beautiful and exciting subject.

This reissued classic text is the acclaimed second edition of Professor Ian Macdonald's groundbreaking monograph on symmetric functions and Hall polynomials. The first edition was published in 1979, before being significantly expanded into the present edition in 1995. This text is widely regarded as the best source of information on Hall polynomials and what have come to be known as Macdonald polynomials, central to a number of key developments in mathematics and mathematical physics in the 21st century Macdonald polynomials gave rise to the subject of double affine Hecke algebras (or Cherednik algebras) important in representation theory. String theorists use Macdonald polynomials to attack the so-called AGT conjectures. Macdonald polynomials have been recently used to construct knot invariants. They are also a central tool for a theory of integrable stochastic models that have found a number of applications in probability, such as random matrices, directed polymers in random media, driven lattice gases, and so on. Macdonald polynomials have become a part of basic material that a researcher simply must know if (s)he wants to work in one of the above domains, ensuring this new edition will appeal to a very broad mathematical audience. Featuring a new foreword by Professor Richard Stanley of MIT.

This work contains detailed descriptions of developments in the combinatorics of the space of diagonal harmonics, a topic at the forefront of current research in algebraic combinatorics. These developments have led in turn to some surprising discoveries in the combinatorics of Macdonald polynomials.

This is the second of three volumes that form the Encyclopedia of Special Functions, an extensive update of the Bateman Manuscript Project. Volume 2 covers multivariable special functions. When the Bateman project appeared, study of these was in an early stage, but revolutionary developments began to be made in the 1980s and have continued ever since. World-renowned experts survey these over the course of 12 chapters, each containing an extensive bibliography. The reader encounters different perspectives on a wide range of topics, from Dunkl theory, to Macdonald theory, to the various deep generalizations of classical hypergeometric functions to the several variables case, including the elliptic level. Particular attention is paid to the close relation of the subject with Lie theory, geometry, mathematical physics and combinatorics.

The most general construction of double affine Artin groups (DAAG) and Hecke algebras (DAHA) associates such objects to pairs of compatible reductive group data. We show that DAAG/DAHA always admit a faithful action by auto-morphisms of a finite index subgroup of the Artin group of type A2, which descends to a faithful outer action of a congruence subgroup of SL(2, Z)or PSL(2, Z). This was previously known only in some special cases and, to the best of our knowledge, not even conjectured to hold in full generality. It turns out that the structural intricacies of DAAG/DAHA are captured by the underlying semisimple data and, to a large extent, even by adjoint data; we prove our main result by reduction to the adjoint case. Adjoint DAAG/DAHA correspond in a natural way to affine Lie algebras, or more precisely to their affinized Weyl groups, which are the semi-direct products W 􀀁 Q∨ of the Weyl group W with the coroot lattice Q∨. They were defined topologically by van der Lek, and independently, algebraically, by Cherednik. We now describe our results for the adjoint case in greater detail. We first give a new Coxeter-type presentation for adjoint DAAG as quotients of the Coxeter braid groups associated to certain crystallographic diagrams that we call double affine Coxeter diagrams. As a consequence we show that the rank two Artin groups of type A2,B2,G2 act by automorphisms on the adjoint DAAG/DAHA associated to affine Lie algebras of twist number r =1, 2, 3, respec-tively. This extends a fundamental result of Cherednik for r =1. We show further that the above rank two Artin group action descends to an outer action of the congruence subgroup Γ1(r). In particular, Γ1(r) acts naturally on the set of isomorphism classes of representations of an adjoint DAAG/DAHA of twist number r, giving rise to a projective representation of Γ1(r)on the spaceof aΓ1(r)-stable representation. We also provide a classification of the involutions of Kazhdan-Lusztig type that appear in the context of these actions.