Signed enumeration of ribbon tableaux: an approach through growth diagrams

Abstract

We give an extension of the famous Schensted correspondence to the case of ribbon tableaux, where ribbons are allowed to be of different sizes. This is done by extending Fomin's growth diagram approach of the classical correspondence, in particular by allowing signs in the enumeration. As an application, we give in particular a combinatorial proof, based on the Murnaghan---Nakayama rule, for the evaluation of the column sums of the character table of the symmetric group.