On the Vershik-Kerov Conjecture Concerning the Shannon-McMillan-Breiman Theorem for the Plancherel Family of Measures on the Space of Young Diagrams

Vershik and Kerov conjectured in 1985 that dimensions of irreducible representations of finite symmetric groups, after appropriate normalization, converge to a constant with respect to the Plancherel family of measures on the space of Young diagrams. The statement of the Vershik-Kerov conjecture can be seen as an analogue of the Shannon-McMillan-Breiman Theorem for the non-stationary Markov process of the growth of a Young diagram. The limiting constant is then interpreted as the entropy of the Plancherel measure. The main result of the paper is the proof of the Vershik-Kerov conjecture. The argument is based on the methods of Borodin, Okounkov and Olshanski.