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Spending symmetry

18 November, 2012 in admin, book | by Terence Tao | 9 comments

I recently finished the first draft of the last of my books based on my 2011 blog posts (and also my Google buzzes and Google+ posts from that year), entitled “Spending symmetry“. The PDF of this draft is available here. This is again a rather assorted (and lightly edited) collection of posts (and buzzes, and Google+ posts), though concentrating in the areas of analysis (both standard and nonstandard), logic, and geometry. As always, comments and corrections are welcome.

Mini-polymath4 discussion thread

12 July, 2012 in admin, polymath | Tags: mini-polymath4 | by Terence Tao | 7 comments

I’ve just opened the research thread for the mini-polymath4 project over at the polymath blog to collaboratively solve one of the six questions from this year’s IMO. This year I have selected Q3, which is a somewhat intricate game-theoretic question. (The full list of questions this year may be found here.)

This post will serve as the discussion thread of the project, intended to focus all the non-research aspects of the project such as organisational matters or commentary on the progress of the project. The third component of the project is the wiki page, which is intended to summarise the progress made so far on the problem.

As with the previous mini-polymath projects, I myself will be serving primarily as a moderator, and hope other participants will take the lead in the research and in keeping the wiki up-to-date.

Mini-polymath4 begins in three hours

12 July, 2012 in admin, polymath | by Terence Tao | Leave a comment

Just a reminder that the mini-polymath4 project will begin in three hours at Thu July 12 2012 UTC 22:00.

Updates on the two polymath projects

15 June, 2012 in admin, polymath, update | Tags: mini-polymath, polymath7 | by Terence Tao | 2 comments

Two quick updates with regards to polymath projects. Firstly, given the poll on starting the mini-polymath4 project, I will start the project at Thu July 12 2012 UTC 22:00. As usual, the main research thread on this project will be held at the polymath blog, with the discussion thread hosted separately on this blog.

Second, the Polymath7 project, which seeks to establish the “hot spots conjecture” for acute-angled triangles, has made a fair amount of progress so far; for instance, the first part of the conjecture (asserting that the second Neumann eigenfunction of an acute non-equilateral triangle is simple) is now solved, and the second part (asserting that the “hot spots” (i.e. extrema) of that second eigenfunction lie on the boundary of the triangle) has been solved in a number of special cases (such as the isosceles case). It’s been quite an active discussion in the last week or so, with almost 200 comments across two threads (and a third thread freshly opened up just now). While the problem is still not completely solved, I feel optimistic that it should fall within the next few weeks (if nothing else, it seems that the problem is now at least amenable to a brute force numerical attack, though personally I would prefer to see a more conceptual solution).

Two polymath projects

4 June, 2012 in admin, polymath | Tags: mini-polymath | by Terence Tao | 4 comments

Two polymath related items for this post. Firstly, there is a new polymath proposal over at the polymath blog, proposing to attack the “hot spots conjecture” (concerning a maximum principle for a heat equation) in the case when the domain is an acute-angled triangle (the case of the right and obtuse-angled triangles already being solved). Please feel free to comment on the proposal blog post if you are interested in participating.

Secondly, it is once again time to set up the annual “mini-polymath” project to collaboratively solve one of this year’s International Mathematical Olympiad problems. This year, the Olympiad is being held in Argentina, with the problems given out on July 10-11. As usual, there will be a wiki page, discussion thread, and research thread for the project. As in previous years, the first thing to resolve is the starting date and time, so I am setting up a poll here to fix a time (and also to get a preliminary indication of interest in the project). (I am using 24-hour Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) for these times. Here is a link that converts the first time given in the poll (Thu Jul 12 2012 UTC 6:00) into other time zones.) Given that the last three mini-polymaths were reasonably successful, I am not planning any changes to the format, but of course if there are any suggestions for changes, I’d be happy to hear them in the comments.

Course announcement: 254B, expansion in groups of Lie type

25 November, 2011 in 254B - expansion in groups, admin | by Terence Tao | 4 comments

In the Winter quarter (starting on January 9), I will be teaching a graduate course on expansion in groups of Lie type. This course will focus on constructions of expanding Cayley graphs on finite groups of Lie type (such as the special linear groups $SL_d({\bf F}_q)$ , or their simple quotients $PSL_d({\bf F}_q)$ , but also including more exotic “twisted” groups of Lie type, such as the Steinberg or Suzuki-Ree groups), including the “classical” constructions of Margulis and of Selberg, but also the more recent constructions of Bourgain-Gamburd and later authors (including some very recent work of Ben Green, Emmanuel Breuillard, Rob Guralnick, and myself which is nearing completion and which I plan to post about shortly). As usual, I plan to start posting lecture notes on this blog before the course begins.

254A, Notes 0: Hilbert’s fifth problem and related topics

27 August, 2011 in 254A - Hilbert's fifth problem, admin, math.CO, math.GR, math.LO, math.MG | Tags: approximate groups, Freiman's theorem, Gromov's theorem, Hilbert's fifth problem, nilpotent groups, polynomial growth | by Terence Tao | 27 comments

This fall (starting Monday, September 26), I will be teaching a graduate topics course which I have entitled “Hilbert’s fifth problem and related topics.” The course is going to focus on three related topics:

Hilbert’s fifth problem on the topological description of Lie groups, as well as the closely related (local) classification of locally compact groups (the Gleason-Yamabe theorem).
Approximate groups in nonabelian groups, and their classification via the Gleason-Yamabe theorem (this is very recent work of Emmanuel Breuillard, Ben Green, Tom Sanders, and myself, building upon earlier work of Hrushovski);
Gromov’s theorem on groups of polynomial growth, as proven via the classification of approximate groups (as well as some consequences to fundamental groups of Riemannian manifolds).

I have already blogged about these topics repeatedly in the past (particularly with regard to Hilbert’s fifth problem), and I intend to recycle some of that material in the lecture notes for this course.

The above three families of results exemplify two broad principles (part of what I like to call “the dichotomy between structure and randomness“):

(Rigidity) If a group-like object exhibits a weak amount of regularity, then it (or a large portion thereof) often automatically exhibits a strong amount of regularity as well;
(Structure) This strong regularity manifests itself either as Lie type structure (in continuous settings) or nilpotent type structure (in discrete settings). (In some cases, “nilpotent” should be replaced by sister properties such as “abelian“, “solvable“, or “polycyclic“.)

Let me illustrate what I mean by these two principles with two simple examples, one in the continuous setting and one in the discrete setting. We begin with a continuous example. Given an ${n \times n}$ complex matrix ${A \in M_n({\bf C})}$ , define the matrix exponential ${\exp(A)}$ of ${A}$ by the formula

$\displaystyle \exp(A) := \sum_{k=0}^\infty \frac{A^k}{k!} = 1 + A + \frac{1}{2!} A^2 + \frac{1}{3!} A^3 + \ldots$

which can easily be verified to be an absolutely convergent series.

Exercise 1 Show that the map ${A \mapsto \exp(A)}$ is a real analytic (and even complex analytic) map from ${M_n({\bf C})}$ to ${M_n({\bf C})}$ , and obeys the restricted homomorphism property
$\displaystyle \exp(sA) \exp(tA) = \exp((s+t)A) \ \ \ \ \ (1)$

for all ${A \in M_n({\bf C})}$ and ${s,t \in {\bf C}}$ .

Proposition 1 (Rigidity and structure of matrix homomorphisms) Let ${n}$ be a natural number. Let ${GL_n({\bf C})}$ be the group of invertible ${n \times n}$ complex matrices. Let ${\Phi: {\bf R} \rightarrow GL_n({\bf C})}$ be a map obeying two properties:

(Group-like object) ${\Phi}$ is a homomorphism, thus ${\Phi(s) \Phi(t) = \Phi(s+t)}$ for all ${s,t \in {\bf R}}$ .

(Weak regularity) The map ${t \mapsto \Phi(t)}$ is continuous.

Then:

(Strong regularity) The map ${t \mapsto \Phi(t)}$ is smooth (i.e. infinitely differentiable). In fact it is even real analytic.

(Lie-type structure) There exists a (unique) complex ${n \times n}$ matrix ${A}$ such that ${\Phi(t) = \exp(tA)}$ for all ${t \in {\bf R}}$ .

Proof: Let ${\Phi}$ be as above. Let ${\epsilon > 0}$ be a small number (depending only on ${n}$ ). By the homomorphism property, ${\Phi(0) = 1}$ (where we use ${1}$ here to denote the identity element of ${GL_n({\bf C})}$ ), and so by continuity we may find a small ${t_0>0}$ such that ${\Phi(t) = 1 + O(\epsilon)}$ for all ${t \in [-t_0,t_0]}$ (we use some arbitrary norm here on the space of ${n \times n}$ matrices, and allow implied constants in the ${O()}$ notation to depend on ${n}$ ).

The map ${A \mapsto \exp(A)}$ is real analytic and (by the inverse function theorem) is a diffeomorphism near ${0}$ . Thus, by the inverse function theorem, we can (if ${\epsilon}$ is small enough) find a matrix ${B}$ of size ${B = O(\epsilon)}$ such that ${\Phi(t_0) = \exp(B)}$ . By the homomorphism property and (1), we thus have

$\displaystyle \Phi(t_0/2)^2 = \Phi(t_0) = \exp(B) = \exp(B/2)^2.$

On the other hand, by another application of the inverse function theorem we see that the squaring map ${A \mapsto A^2}$ is a diffeomorphism near ${1}$ in ${GL_n({\bf C})}$ , and thus (if ${\epsilon}$ is small enough)

$\displaystyle \Phi(t_0/2) = \exp(B/2).$

We may iterate this argument (for a fixed, but small, value of ${\epsilon}$ ) and conclude that

$\displaystyle \Phi(t_0/2^k) = \exp(B/2^k)$

for all ${k = 0,1,2,\ldots}$ . By the homomorphism property and (1) we thus have

$\displaystyle \Phi(qt_0) = \exp(qB)$

whenever ${q}$ is a dyadic rational, i.e. a rational of the form ${a/2^k}$ for some integer ${a}$ and natural number ${k}$ . By continuity we thus have

$\displaystyle \Phi(st_0) = \exp(sB)$

for all real ${s}$ . Setting ${A := B/t_0}$ we conclude that

$\displaystyle \Phi(t) = \exp(tA)$

for all real ${t}$ , which gives existence of the representation and also real analyticity and smoothness. Finally, uniqueness of the representation ${\Phi(t) = \exp(tA)}$ follows from the identity

$\displaystyle A = \frac{d}{dt} \exp(tA)|_{t=0}.$

$\Box$

Exercise 2 Generalise Proposition 1 by replacing the hypothesis that ${\Phi}$ is continuous with the hypothesis that ${\Phi}$ is Lebesgue measurable (Hint: use the Steinhaus theorem.). Show that the proposition fails (assuming the axiom of choice) if this hypothesis is omitted entirely.

Note how one needs both the group-like structure and the weak regularity in combination in order to ensure the strong regularity; neither is sufficient on its own. We will see variants of the above basic argument throughout the course. Here, the task of obtaining smooth (or real analytic structure) was relatively easy, because we could borrow the smooth (or real analytic) structure of the domain ${{\bf R}}$ and range ${M_n({\bf C})}$ ; but, somewhat remarkably, we shall see that one can still build such smooth or analytic structures even when none of the original objects have any such structure to begin with.

Now we turn to a second illustration of the above principles, namely Jordan’s theorem, which uses a discreteness hypothesis to upgrade Lie type structure to nilpotent (and in this case, abelian) structure. We shall formulate Jordan’s theorem in a slightly stilted fashion in order to emphasise the adherence to the above-mentioned principles.

Theorem 2 (Jordan’s theorem) Let ${G}$ be an object with the following properties:

(Group-like object) ${G}$ is a group.

(Discreteness) ${G}$ is finite.

(Lie-type structure) ${G}$ is contained in ${U_n({\bf C})}$ (the group of unitary ${n \times n}$ matrices) for some ${n}$ .

Then there is a subgroup ${G'}$ of ${G}$ such that

( ${G'}$ is close to ${G}$ ) The index ${|G/G'|}$ of ${G'}$ in ${G}$ is ${O_n(1)}$ (i.e. bounded by ${C_n}$ for some quantity ${C_n}$ depending only on ${n}$ ).

(Nilpotent-type structure) ${G'}$ is abelian.

A key observation in the proof of Jordan’s theorem is that if two unitary elements ${g, h \in U_n({\bf C})}$ are close to the identity, then their commutator ${[g,h] = g^{-1}h^{-1}gh}$ is even closer to the identity (in, say, the operator norm ${\| \|_{op}}$ ). Indeed, since multiplication on the left or right by unitary elements does not affect the operator norm, we have

$\displaystyle \| [g,h] - 1 \|_{op} = \| gh - hg \|_{op}$

$\displaystyle = \| (g-1)(h-1) - (h-1)(g-1) \|_{op}$

and so by the triangle inequality

$\displaystyle \| [g,h] - 1 \|_{op} \leq 2 \|g-1\|_{op} \|h-1\|_{op}. \ \ \ \ \ (2)$

Now we can prove Jordan’s theorem.

Proof: We induct on ${n}$ , the case ${n=1}$ being trivial. Suppose first that ${G}$ contains a central element ${g}$ which is not a multiple of the identity. Then, by definition, ${G}$ is contained in the centraliser ${Z(g)}$ of ${g}$ , which by the spectral theorem is isomorphic to a product ${U_{n_1}({\bf C}) \times \ldots \times U_{n_k}({\bf C})}$ of smaller unitary groups. Projecting ${G}$ to each of these factor groups and applying the induction hypothesis, we obtain the claim.

Thus we may assume that ${G}$ contains no central elements other than multiples of the identity. Now pick a small ${\epsilon > 0}$ (one could take ${\epsilon=\frac{1}{10d}}$ in fact) and consider the subgroup ${G'}$ of ${G}$ generated by those elements of ${G}$ that are within ${\epsilon}$ of the identity (in the operator norm). By considering a maximal ${\epsilon}$ -net of ${G}$ we see that ${G'}$ has index at most ${O_{n,\epsilon}(1)}$ in ${G}$ . By arguing as before, we may assume that ${G'}$ has no central elements other than multiples of the identity.

If ${G'}$ consists only of multiples of the identity, then we are done. If not, take an element ${g}$ of ${G'}$ that is not a multiple of the identity, and which is as close as possible to the identity (here is where we crucially use that ${G}$ is finite). By (2), we see that if ${\epsilon}$ is sufficiently small depending on ${n}$ , and if ${h}$ is one of the generators of ${G'}$ , then ${[g,h]}$ lies in ${G'}$ and is closer to the identity than ${g}$ , and is thus a multiple of the identity. On the other hand, ${[g,h]}$ has determinant ${1}$ . Given that it is so close to the identity, it must therefore be the identity (if ${\epsilon}$ is small enough). In other words, ${g}$ is central in ${G'}$ , and is thus a multiple of the identity. But this contradicts the hypothesis that there are no central elements other than multiples of the identity, and we are done. $\Box$

Commutator estimates such as (2) will play a fundamental role in many of the arguments we will see in this course; as we saw above, such estimates combine very well with a discreteness hypothesis, but will also be very useful in the continuous setting.

Exercise 3 Generalise Jordan’s theorem to the case when ${G}$ is a finite subgroup of ${GL_n({\bf C})}$ rather than of ${U_n({\bf C})}$ . (Hint: The elements of ${G}$ are not necessarily unitary, and thus do not necessarily preserve the standard Hilbert inner product of ${{\bf C}^n}$ . However, if one averages that inner product by the finite group ${G}$ , one obtains a new inner product on ${{\bf C}^n}$ that is preserved by ${G}$ , which allows one to conjugate ${G}$ to a subgroup of ${U_n({\bf C})}$ . This averaging trick is (a small) part of Weyl’s unitary trick in representation theory.)

Exercise 4 (Inability to discretise nonabelian Lie groups) Show that if ${n \geq 3}$ , then the orthogonal group ${O_n({\bf R})}$ cannot contain arbitrarily dense finite subgroups, in the sense that there exists an ${\epsilon = \epsilon_n > 0}$ depending only on ${n}$ such that for every finite subgroup ${G}$ of ${O_n({\bf R})}$ , there exists a ball of radius ${\epsilon}$ in ${O_n({\bf R})}$ (with, say, the operator norm metric) that is disjoint from ${G}$ . What happens in the ${n=2}$ case?

Remark 1 More precise classifications of the finite subgroups of ${U_n({\bf C})}$ are known, particularly in low dimensions. For instance, one can show that the only finite subgroups of ${SO_3({\bf R})}$ (which ${SU_2({\bf C})}$ is a double cover of) are isomorphic to either a cyclic group, a dihedral group, or the symmetry group of one of the Platonic solids.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mini-polymath3 begins in 24 hours

18 July, 2011 in admin, polymath | Tags: mini-polymath3 | by Terence Tao | 1 comment

Just a reminder that the mini-polymath3 project begins in 24 hours, on July 19, 8pm UTC.

Compactness and contradiction

1 July, 2011 in admin, book | by Terence Tao | 9 comments

I recently finished the first draft of the last of my books based on my 2010 blog posts (and also my Google buzzes), entitled “Compactness and contradiction“. The PDF of this draft is available here. This is a somewhat assorted (and lightly edited) collection of posts (and buzzes), though concentrating in the areas of analysis (both standard and nonstandard), logic, and group theory. As always, comments and corrections are welcome.

Mini-polymath 3 time and date

28 June, 2011 in admin, polymath | Tags: mini-polymath3 | by Terence Tao | 1 comment

Following the results from the recent poll on this blog, the mini-polymath3 project (which will focus on one of the problems from the 2011 IMO) will start at July 19 8pm UTC, and be run concurrently on this blog, on the polymath wiki, and on the polymath blog.

	cars on Create lemmas
	Luqing Ye on 245A, Notes 2: The Lebesgue…
	Luqing Ye on 245A, Notes 2: The Lebesgue…
	Luqing Ye on 245A, Notes 2: The Lebesgue…
	Luqing Ye on 245A, Notes 2: The Lebesgue…
	Luqing Ye on 245A, Notes 2: The Lebesgue…
	mixedmath on Multiple recurrence and conver…
	Multiple recurrence… on Open question: best bounds for…
	Multiple recurrence… on The inverse conjecture for the…
	Multiple recurrence… on An inverse theorem for the uni…
	Multiple recurrence… on 254A, Lecture 16: A Ratner-typ…
	Multiple recurrence… on 254A, Lecture 13: Compact…
	Multiple recurrence… on 254A, Lecture 9: Ergodici…
	Multiple recurrence… on 254A, Lecture 8: The mean ergo…
	Mauricio Calvao on A mathematical formalisation o…

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Spending symmetry

Mini-polymath4 discussion thread

Mini-polymath4 begins in three hours

Updates on the two polymath projects

Two polymath projects

Course announcement: 254B, expansion in groups of Lie type

254A, Notes 0: Hilbert’s fifth problem and related topics

Mini-polymath3 begins in 24 hours

Compactness and contradiction

Mini-polymath 3 time and date

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