1
Postdoctoral Fellow, Indian Statistical Institute Bangalore, India
2
Assistant Professor in Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India.
Abstract
Suppose $f$ is a map from a non-empty finite set $X$ to a finite group $G$. Define the map $\zeta^f_G: G\longrightarrow \mathbb{N}\cup \{0\}$ by $g\mapsto |f^{-1}(g)|$. In this article, we show that for a suitable choice of $f$, the map $\zeta^f_G$ is a character. We use our results to show that the solution function for the word equation $w(t_1,t_2,\dots,t_n)=g$ ($g\in G$) is a character, where $w(t_1,t_2,\dots,t_n)$ denotes the product of $t_1,t_2,\dots,t_n,t_1^{-1},t_2^{-1},\dots,t_n^{-1}$ in a randomly chosen order.
