I am currently using Fulton and Harris for a course on representation theory, and I have noticed that there are a few errors throughout the book. A search on google with the keywords "Errata for Fulton and Harris" doesn't come up with anything.
I believe the book is widely used in many representation theory courses, and it would be helpful if a list of errata could be compiled. Does anyone know of any list of errata for this?
Thanks.
Errors I have found: On page 150 (in the middle) the line "…so the representation $W = \Bbb{C}\cdot x^2 \oplus \Bbb{C} \cdot xy \oplus \Bbb{C} \cdot y^2 = W_{-2} \oplus W_0 \otimes W_2$ is the…" should have a direct sum in place of tensor product in between $W_0$ and $W_2$.
Best Answer
Being somewhat error-prone myself, I'm well aware of the need to collect errata in some systematic way. In the Internet age this has often been done in ad hoc ways on individual homepages, though some publishers (like AMS) are trying to establish durable book pages at their site with updates and errata posted by the authors from time to time.
All of us who consult the book of Fulton & Harris tend to view some of the passages as written down too informally, but there are also some outright errors. For example, many people seem to have trouble following the proof of Proposition 15.15, while Exercise 15.19 has an obvious error in the special case of Weyl's dimension formula: $a+b+1$ should be $a+b+2$.
I did try (unsuccessfully) at one point to get direct clarification from the authors, but it would be optimal for Springer to coordinate the collection of errata. Printing technology now favors print-on-demand and e-books, but these are cheapest when no changes are made in the original printing plates made from a TeX file. Even though it's easy to correct a TeX file, that by itself doesn't motivate publishers to issue corrected reprints. So they do have a responsibility to provide more help to readers in other ways. (By the way, my copy of Fulton & Harris is a first printing, so I'm unsure what if anything has been changed in later printings.)