Representations of A-type Hecke algebras

We review some facts about the representation theory of the Hecke algebra. We adapt for the Hecke algebra case the approach of Okounkov and Vershik which was developed for the representation theory of symmetric groups. We justify an explicit construction of the idempotents in the Hecke algebra in terms of Jucys-Murphy elements. Ocneanu's traces for these idempotents (which can be interpreted as q-dimensions of corresponding irreducible representations of quantum linear groups) are presented.