Abstract
Adams and Conway have stated without proof a result which says, roughly speaking, that the representation ring R(G) of a compact, connected Lie group G is generated as a λ-ring by elements in 1-to-1 correspondence with the branches of the Dynkin diagram. In this note we present an elementary proof of this.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I would like to thank Skip Garibaldi for his suggestions.
Notes
1Such weights do exist, cf. the 26-dimensional representation of F 4 which has two zero weights.
Communicated by E. I. Zelmanov.