The positive-definiteness of the complete symmetric functions of even order

Abstract

An important role in the classical theory of symmetric functions of a real n-tuple x = (x1, x2, …, xn) is played by the complete symmetric functions or homogeneous product sums hr defined by the generating function(see Littlewood (5), p. 82). In an earlier paper (4) I conjectured that h2r is positive definite. The main object of the present paper is to prove this conjecture in a rather sharper form.