Fifty years ago Claude Chevalley revolutionized Lie theory by pub­ lishing his classic Theory of Lie Groups I. Before his book Lie theory was a mixture of local and global results. As Chevalley put it,'This limitation was probably necessary as long as general topology was not yet sufficiently well elaborated to provide a solid base for a theory in the large. These days are now passed:'Indeed, they are passed because Chevalley's book changed matters. Chevalley made global Lie groups into the primary objects of study. In his third and fourth chapters he introduced the global notion of ana­ lytic subgroup, so that Lie subalgebras corresponded exactly to analytic subgroups. This correspondence is now taken as absolutely standard, and any introduction to general Lie groups has to have it at its core. Nowadays'local Lie groups'are a thing of the past; they arise only at one point in the development, and only until Chevalley's results have been stated and have eliminated the need for the local theory. But where does the theory go from this point? Fifty years after Cheval­ ley's book, there are clear topics: E. Cartan's completion ofW. Killing's work on classifying complex semisimple Lie algebras, the treatment of finite-dimensional representations of complex semisimple Lie algebras and compact Lie groups by Cartan and H. Weyl, the structure theory begun by Cartan for real semisimple Lie algebras and Lie groups, and harmonic analysis in the setting of semisimple groups as begun by Cartan and Weyl.

zlib/no-category/Knapp, Anthony W/Lie Groups Beyond an Introduction ||_73416174.pdf

Knapp, Anthony W

Birkhäuser Boston : Imprint : Birkhäuser

Birkhauser Verlag

Springer

Progress in Mathematics, Boston, MA, 1996

United States, United States of America

Springer Nature, Boston, MA, 2013

2nd, 1996

sm41110439

Lie Groups Beyond an Introduction takes the reader from the end of introductory Lie group theory to the threshold of infinite-dimensional group representations. Merging algebra and analysis throughout, the author uses Lie-theoretic methods to develop a beautiful theory having wide applications in mathematics and physics. A feature of the presentation is that it encourages the reader's comprehension of Lie group theory to evolve from beginner to expert: initial insights make use of actual matrices, while later insights come from such structural features as properties of root systems, or relationships among subgroups, or patterns among different subgroups. Topics include a description of all simply connected Lie groups in terms of semisimple Lie groups and semidirect products, the Cartan theory of complex semisimple Lie algebras, the Cartan-Weyl theory of the structure and representations of compact Lie groups and representations of complex semisimple Lie algebras, the classification of real semisimple Lie algebras, the structure theory of noncompact reductive Lie groups as it is now used in research, and integration on reductive groups. Many problems, tables, and bibliographical notes complete this comprehensive work, making the text suitable either for self-study or for courses in the second year of graduate study and beyond.

2015-08-03