DUALITY, CENTRAL CHARACTERS, AND REAL-VALUED CHARACTERS OF FINITE GROUPS OF LIE TYPE

We prove that the duality operator preserves the Frobenius-Schur indicators of characters of connected reductive groups of Lie type with connected center. This allows us to extend a result of D. Prasad which relates the Frobenius-Schur indicator of a regular real-valued character to its central character. We apply these results to compute the Frobenius-Schur indicators of certain real-valued, irreducible, Frobenius-invariant Deligne-Lusztig characters, and the Frobenius-Schur indicators of real-valued regular and semisimple characters of finite unitary groups.