Advances in the Theory of Compact Groups and Pro-Lie Groups in the Last Quarter Century

This article surveys the development of the theory of compact groups and pro-Lie groups, contextualizing the major achievements over 125 years and focusing on some progress in the last quarter century. It begins with developments in the 18th and 19th centuries. Next is from Hilbert’s Fifth Problem in 1900 to its solution in 1952 by Montgomery, Zippin, and Gleason and Yamabe’s important structure theorem on almost connected locally compact groups. This half century included profound contributions by Weyl and Peter, Haar, Pontryagin, van Kampen, Weil, and Iwasawa. The focus in the last quarter century has been structure theory, largely resulting from extending Lie Theory to compact groups and then to pro-Lie groups, which are projective limits of finite-dimensional Lie groups. The category of pro-Lie groups is the smallest complete category containing Lie groups and includes all compact groups, locally compact abelian groups, and connected locally compact groups. Amongst the structure theorems is that each almost connected pro-Lie group G is homeomorphic to RI×C for a suitable set I and some compact subgroup C. Finally, there is a perfect generalization to compact groups G of the age-old natural duality of the group algebra R[G] of a finite group G to its representation algebra R(G,R), via the natural duality of the topological vector space RI to the vector space R(I), for any set I, thus opening a new approach to the Hochschild-Tannaka duality of compact groups.

THE LATTICE OF ALTER EGOS

We introduce a new Galois connection for partial operations on a finite set, which induces a natural quasi-order on the collection of all partial algebras on this set. The quasi-order is compatible with the basic concepts of natural duality theory, and we use it to turn the set of all alter egos of a given finite algebra into a doubly algebraic lattice. The Galois connection provides a framework for us to develop further the theory of natural dualities for partial algebras. The development unifies several fundamental concepts from duality theory and reveals a new understanding of full dualities, particularly at the finite level.

UNCOUNTABLY MANY DUALISABLE ALGEBRAS

Fix a finite set M with at least three elements. We find uncountably many different clones on M, each of which is the clone of term functions of a strongly dualisable algebra. This provides a solution to the Finite Type Problem of natural duality theory: there are finite algebras that are dualisable but not via a structure of finite type.

DUALIZABILITY OF GRAPHS

We investigate natural dualities for classes of simple graphs. For example, we give a natural duality for the class consisting of all n-colourable graphs and show that, for all n≥3, there is no natural duality for the class consisting of all freely n-colourable graphs. We also prove that there exist arbitrarily long finite chains of 3-colourable graphs that alternate between being dualizable and nondualizable.

Graphs, Links, and Duality on Surfaces

We introduce a polynomial invariant of graphs on surfaces,PG, generalizing the classical Tutte polynomial. Topological duality on surfaces gives rise to a natural duality result forPG, analogous to the duality for the Tutte polynomial of planar graphs. This property is important from the perspective of statistical mechanics, where the Tutte polynomial is known as the partition function of the Potts model. For ribbon graphs,PGspecializes to the well-known Bollobás–Riordan polynomial, and in fact the two polynomials carry equivalent information in this context. Duality is also established for a multivariate version of the polynomialPG. We then consider a 2-variable version of the Jones polynomial for links in thickened surfaces, taking into account homological information on the surface. An analogue of Thistlethwaite's theorem is established for these generalized Jones and Tutte polynomials for virtual links.

The algebra of cell-zeta values

In this paper, we introduce cell-forms on 𝔐0,n, which are top-dimensional differential forms diverging along the boundary of exactly one cell (connected component) of the real moduli space 𝔐0,n(ℝ). We show that the cell-forms generate the top-dimensional cohomology group of 𝔐0,n, so that there is a natural duality between cells and cell-forms. In the heart of the paper, we determine an explicit basis for the subspace of differential forms which converge along a given cell X. The elements of this basis are called insertion forms; their integrals over X are real numbers, called cell-zeta values, which generate a ℚ-algebra called the cell-zeta algebra. By a result of F. Brown, the cell-zeta algebra is equal to the algebra of multizeta values. The cell-zeta values satisfy a family of simple quadratic relations coming from the geometry of moduli spaces, which leads to a natural definition of a formal version of the cell-zeta algebra, conjecturally isomorphic to the formal multizeta algebra defined by the much-studied double shuffle relations.