  Richard Stanley played a crucial role, through his work and his students, in
the development of the relatively new area known as combinatorial
representation theory. In the early stages, he has the merit to have pointed
out to combinatorialists the potential that representation theory has for
applications of combinatorial methods. Throughout his distinguished career, he
wrote significant articles which touch upon various combinatorial aspects
related to representation theory (of Lie algebras, the symmetric group, etc.).
I describe some of Richard's contributions involving Lie algebras, as well as
recent developments inspired by them (including some open problems), which
attest the lasting impact of his work.
