Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2009
In the last six lines of Turnbull's 1948 paper, he left an enigmatic statement on a Capelli-type identity for skew-symmetric matrix spaces. In the present paper, on Turnbull's suggestion, we show that certain Capelli-type identities hold for this case. Our formulae connect explicitly the central elements in U(gln) to the invariant differential operators, both of which are expressed with permanent. This also clarifies the meaning of Turnbull's statement from the Lie-theoretic point of view.