A new approach to the character theory of the symmetric group has been developed during the past fifteen years which is in many ways more efficient, more transparent, and more elementary. In this approach, to each permutation is assigned a class function of the corresponding symmetric group. Problems in character theory can thereby be transferred into a completely different setting and reduced to combinatorial problems on permutations in a natural and uniform way.This is the first account in book form entirely devoted to the new “noncommutative method”. As a modern and...