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the Azumaya locus does determine the order

Clearly
this cannot be correct for consider for $n \in \mathbb{N} $ the order

$A_n = \begin{bmatrix} \mathbb{C}[x] & \mathbb{C}[x] \\ (x^n) &
\mathbb{C}[x] \end{bmatrix} $

For $m \not= n $ the orders $A_n $
and $A_m $ have isomorphic Azumaya locus, but are not isomorphic as
orders. Still, the statement in the heading is _morally_ what Nikolaus
Vonessen
and Zinovy
Reichstein
are proving in their paper Polynomial identity
rings as rings of functions
. So I better clarify what they do claim
precisely.

Let $A $ be a _Cayley-Hamilton order_, that is, a
prime affine $\mathbb{C} $-algebra, finite as a module over its center
and satisfying all trace relations holding in $M_n(\mathbb{C}) $. If $A $
is generated by $m $ elements, then its _representation variety_
$\mathbf{rep}_n~A $ has as points the m-tuples of $n \times n $ matrices

$(X_1,\ldots,X_m) \in M_n(\mathbb{C}) \oplus \ldots \oplus
M_n(\mathbb{C}) $

which satisfy all the defining relations of
A. $\mathbf{rep}_n~A $ is an affine variety with a $GL_n $-action
(induced by simultaneous conjugation in m-tuples of matrices) and has
as a Zariski open subset the tuples $(X_1,\ldots,X_m) \in
\mathbf{rep}_n~A $ having the property that they generate the whole
matrix-algebra $M_n(\mathbb{C}) $. This open subset is called the
Azumaya locus of A and denoted by $\mathbf{azu}_n~A $.

One can also define the _generic Azumaya locus_ as being the
Zariski open subset of $M_n(\mathbb{C}) \oplus \ldots \oplus
M_n(\mathbb{C}) $ consisting of those tuples which generate
$M_n(\mathbb{C}) $ and call this subset $\mathbf{Azu}_n $. In fact, one
can show that $\mathbf{Azu}_n $ is the Azumaya locus of a particular
order namely the trace ring of m generic $n \times n $ matrices.

What Nikolaus and Zinovy prove is that for an order A the Azumaya
locus $\mathbf{azu}_n~A $ is an irreducible subvariety of
$\mathbf{Azu}_n $ and that the embedding

$\mathbf{azu}_n~A
\subset \mathbf{Azu}_n $

determines A itself! If you have
worked a bit with orders this result is strange at first until you
recognize it as being essentially a consequence of Bill Schelter's
catenarity result for affine p.i.-algebras.

On the positive
side it shows that the study of orders is roughly equivalent to that of
the study of irreducible $GL_n $-stable subvarieties of $\mathbf{Azu}_n $.
On the negative side, it shows that the $GL_n $-structure of
$\mathbf{Azu}_n $ is horribly complicated. For example, it is still
unknown in general whether the quotient-variety (which is here also the
orbit space) $\mathbf{Azu}_n / GL_n $ is a rational variety.

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quiver pictures in wordpress

Having

latexrender
available, one can edit the _class.latexrender.php_ file
to include additional LaTeX-packages. For example adding the lines

 
string .= '\usepackage{xy}\n';  
string .= '\xyoption{all}\n';  
string .= '\newcommand{\vtx}[1]{*+[o][F-]{\scriptscriptstyle #1}}\n';

makes it possible to include quiver-pictures in this weblog.
Observe the double blackslash before newcommand, a single backslash
would produce a new-line and fail to define something.

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LatexRender plugin for wordpress under Panther

After
three days of desperate trial-and-error I seem to have managed to get latexrender working for
wordpress under Mac
OS X.
First things first : if you only want to include some
symbols in your blog-posts the easiest way to do so is to use mimetex and the
corresponding
wordpress-plugin
written by Steve Mayer. Follow the
instructions and you will be able to include a limited subset of LaTeX
in your blog within 10 minutes.
If you want more, you have to
work a lot harder. The starting point is to follow Steve’s
blog-entries on latexrender
.
But then under Mac OS X you will probably get error messages
when you activate the plugin. The reason seems to be that most versions
of imagemagick available for
OS X require X-terminal support and PHP gets confused between the two
shells. A typical error message is

Warning:
copy(70afbabac176169545d01f4bd91f3055.gif): failed to open

stream:
No such file or directory in
/Users/lieven/Sites/wordpress/latexrender/class.latexrender.php on
line

269

[Unparseable or potentially dangerous latex
formula. Error 6 ]

As suggested by Steve Mayer there are
two roads to obtain more information on what goes wrong. The first is to
uncomment the _unlink commands _ at the end of the
_class.latexrender.php_ file and look in the _wordpress/latexrender/tmp_
directory for which conversions were done and which failed. The normal
latexrender-procedure is : tex->dvi->ps->gif. Probably you will
get all files but the gifs!

Another (and more useful) source of
informations is to look in the _error-log_ of the Apache-WebServer and
see whether you get things like

This is dvips(k) 5.94a
Copyright 2003 Radical Eye Software (www.radicaleye.com)
\\’
TeX output 2004.08.30:1433\\’ ->
0d48700a5dde6d746813733d26dd8df8.ps

. [1]
sh: line 1:
gs: command not found
convert: no decode delegate for this image
format

/Users/lieven/Sites/weblog/latexrender/tmp/
0d48700a5dde6d746813733d26dd8df8.ps\\’.

convert: missing an image
filename/Users/lieven/Sites/weblog/latexrender/tmp/
0d48700a5dde6d746813733d26dd8df8.gif\\’.

identify: unable to
open image 0d48700a5dde6d746813733d26dd8df8.gif\\': No such file
or directory.
identify: missing an image
filename
0d48700a5dde6d746813733d26dd8df8.gif\\’.

`

Here the essential point is that the webserver doesn’t
seem to be able to find GhostScript (even if you have several versions
installed).

To bypass these problems I did two essential
things : (1) in the _class.latexrender.php_ file I rewrote the
conversions so as to use _pdflatex_ instead of tex (to get
immediately a pdf-file rather than the tex->dvi->ps process) and then
use _convert_ to translate this pdf-file into a gif-file. (2) the
version of _convert_ and _include_ (both part of the
ImageMagick package) are those provided by Fink but you should be extremely
careful to install the imagemagick-nox package and not
the imagemagick package! After the command
sudo fink
install imagemagick-nox

you are presented with several
configuration choices. Do _not_ choose on auto-pilot the default
choices but look for options specifying that there is no X-support!
After this, everything should work. If you want to have a look at how
I changed the PHP files, mail
me
.

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