In mathematics, the Hall–Littlewood polynomials are symmetric functions depending on a parameter t and a partition λ.
They are Schur functions when t is 0 and monomial symmetric functions when t is 1 and are special cases of Macdonald polynomials.
They were first defined indirectly by Philip Hall using the Hall algebra, and later defined directly by Dudley E. Littlewood (1961).
The Hall–Littlewood polynomial P is defined by where λ is a partition of at most n with elements λi, and m(i) elements equal to i, and Sn is the symmetric group of order n!.
, these reduce to the ordinary Kostka coefficients.
A combinatorial description for the Kostka–Foulkes polynomials was given by Lascoux and Schützenberger, where "charge" is a certain combinatorial statistic on semistandard Young tableaux, and the sum is taken over the set
of all semi-standard Young tableaux T with shape λ and type μ.