Let
be the character of an irreducible representation of the symmetric group
corresponding to a partition
of n:
and
. For each partition
of n, let
denote the conjugacy class in
corresponding to it (cf. the example below), and let
denote the number of times j appears in
(so
). Then the Frobenius formula states that the constant value of
on 

is the coefficient of the monomial
in the homogeneous polynomial in
variables

where
is the
-th power sum.
Example: Take
. Let
and hence
,
,
. If
(
), which corresponds to the class of the identity element, then
is the coefficient of
in

which is 2. Similarly, if
(the class of a 3-cycle times an 1-cycle) and
, then
, given by

is −1.
For the identity representation,
and
. The character
will be equal to the coefficient of
in
,
which is 1 for any
as expected.