Irreducible representations of finitely generated nilpotent groups

Abstract

1. Introduction. It is well known that every finite-dimensional irreducible representation of a nilpotent group over an algebraically closed field is monomial, that is induced from a 1-dimensional representation of some subgroup. However, even a finitely generated nilpotent group in general has infinite-dimensional irreducible representations, and as a first step towards an understanding of these one wants to discover whether they too are necessarily monomial. The main point of this note is to show how far they can fail to be so.