Abstract

The study of Schur functors has a relatively long history. Its main impetus derived from representation theory, originally in characteristic zero. Over the years, however, with the development of modular representations, and algebraic geometry over fields of positive characteristic, the need for a theory of universal polynomial functors increased and, since the mid-1960s, approaches to a characteristic-free treatment of Schur functors have been developing (see, for instance, the recent book of Green in which the treatments by Carter and Lusztig, Higman, and Towber, among others, are discussed). Our own interest in such a treatment was awakened by the work of Lascoux on resolutions of determinantal ideals. Although his thesis treated only the characteristic zero case, it suggested that a general and elementary theory of Schur functors could be developed using only the rudiments of multilinear algebra (involving the Hopf algebra structures of the symmetric, exterior, and divided power algebras).