is a finitegroup, then is a finite dimensional Hermitian space over the field of complex numbers (the components of the vectors in it are indexed by Group elements). The scalar product is defined as
Notes
The character of any representation of is an element (vector) in this space
Regular representation definition
We define the following orthonormal basis vectors in , with :
The regular representation contains every irreducible representation and exactly as many times as what the dimension of the irreducible representation is.
Intuitively
The matrices just permutate the coordinates of the vectors in the way the abstract group does.