Speaker: Andrea Previtali Title: Building Characters and Representations for Finite Groups Time & Place: 3-4pm, Thursday 29 November, Eastern Ave Rm 311. Abstract: I will report on old and new techniques to construct characters and representations of finite groups. Since satisfactory algortihms are available for complex characters and for representations over finite fields, I will focus on representations over characteristic zero fields and will touch upon questions concerning Schur indices, central simple algebras and their minimal splitting fields.