The main purpose of these lectures is first to briefly survey the fundamental con nection between the representation theory of the symmetric group Sn and the theory of symmetric functions and second to show how combinatorial methods that arise naturally in the theory of symmetric functions lead to efficient algorithms to express various prod ucts of representations of Sn in terms of sums of irreducible representations. That is, there is a basic isometry which maps the center of the group algebra of Sn, Z(Sn), to the space of homogeneous symmetric functions of degree n, An. This basic isometry...