This morning,
Michel Van den Bergh posted an interesting paper on the arXiv
entitled Double
Poisson Algebras. His main motivation was the construction of a
natural Poisson structure on quotient varieties of representations of
deformed multiplicative preprojective algebras (introduced by
Crawley-Boevey and Shaw in Multiplicative
preprojective algebras, middle convolution and the Deligne-Simpson
problem) which he achieves by extending his double Poisson structure
on the path algebra of the quiver to the 'obvious' universal
localization, that is the one by inverting all $1+aa^{\star} $ for $a $ an
arrow and $a^{\star} $ its double (the one in the other direction).
For me the more interesting fact of this paper is that his double
bracket on the path algebra of a double quiver gives finer information
than the _necklace Lie algebra_ as defined in my (old) paper with Raf
Bocklandt Necklace
Lie algebras and noncommutative symplectic geometry. I will
certainly come back to this later when I have more energy but just to
wet your appetite let me point out that Michel calls a _double bracket_
on an algebra $A $ a bilinear map
$\{ \{ -,- \} \}~:~A \times A
\rightarrow A \otimes A $
which is a derivation in the _second_
argument (for the outer bimodulke structure on $A $) and satisfies
$\{ \{ a,b \} \} = – \{ \{ b,a \} \}^o $ with $~(u \otimes v)^0 = v
\otimes u $
Given such a double bracket one can define an ordinary
bracket (using standard Hopf-algebra notation)
$\{ a,b \} = \sum
\{ \{ a,b \} \}_{(1)} \{ \{ a,b \} \}_{(2)} $
which makes $A $ into
a Loday
algebra and induces a Lie algebra structure on $A/[A,A] $. He then
goes on to define such a double bracket on the path algebra of a double
quiver in such a way that the associated Lie structure above is the
necklace Lie algebra.
Category: featured
I
found an old copy (Vol 2 Number 4 1980) of the The Mathematical Intelligencer with on its front
cover the list of the 26 _known_ sporadic groups together with a
starred added in proof saying
- added in
proof … the classification of finite simple groups is complete.
there are no other sporadic groups.
(click on the left picture to see a larger scanned image). In it is a
beautiful paper by John Conway “Monsters and moonshine” on the
classification project. Along the way he describes the simplest
non-trivial simple group $A_5 $ as the icosahedral group. as well as
other interpretations as Lie groups over finite fields. He also gives a
nice introduction to representation theory and the properties of the
character table allowing to reconstruct $A_5 $ only knowing that there
must be a simple group of order 60.
A more technical account
of the classification project (sketching the main steps in precise
formulations) can be found online in the paper by Ron Solomon On finite simple
groups and their classification. In addition to the posts by John Baez mentioned
in this
post he has a few more columns on Platonic solids and their relation to Lie
algebras, continued here.
In my geometry 101 course I'm doing the rotation-symmetry groups
of the Platonic solids right now. This goes slightly slower than
expected as it turned out that some secondary schools no longer give a
formal definition of what a group is. So, a lot of time is taken up
explaining permutations and their properties as I want to view the
Platonic groups as subgroups of the permutation groups on the vertices.
To prove that the _tetrahedral group_ is isomorphic to $A_4$ was pretty
straigthforward and I'm half way through proving that the
_octahedral group_ is just $S_4$ (using the duality of the octahedron
with the cube and using the $4$ body diagonals of the cube).
Next
week I have to show that the _icosahedral group_ is isomorphic to $A_5$
which is a lot harder. The usual proof (that is, using the duality
between the icosahedron and the dodecahedron and using the $5$ cubes
contained in the dodecahedron, one for each of the diagonals of a face)
involves too much calculations to do in one hour. An alternative road is
to view the icosahedral group as a subgroup of $S_6$ (using the main
diagonals on the $12$ vertices of the icosahedron) and identifying this
subgroup as $A_5$. A neat exposition of this approach is given by John Baez in his
post Some thoughts on
the number $6$. (He also has another post on the icosahedral group
in his Week 79's
finds in mathematical physics).
But
probably I'll go for an “In Gap we
thrust”-argument. Using the numbers on the left, the rotation by
$72^o$ counter-clockwise in the top face we get the permutation in
$S_{20}$
$(1,2,3,4,5)(6,8,10,12,14)(7,9,11,13,15)(16,17,18,19,20)$
and the
rotation by $72^o$ counterclockwise along the face $(1,2,8,7,8)$ gives
the permutation
$(1,6,7,8,2)(3,5,15,16,9)(4,14,20,17,10)(12,13,19,18,11)$
GAP
calculates that the subgroup $dode$ of $S_{20}$ generated by these two
elements is $60$ (the correct number) and with $IsSimplegroup(dode);$ we
find that this group must be simple. Finally using
$IsomorphismTypeInfoFiniteSimplegroup(dode);$
we get the required
result that the group is indeed isomorphic to $A_5$. The time saved I
can then use to tell something about the classification project of
finite simple groups which might be more inspiring than tedious
calculations…