Lie Groups: New Research (Mathematics Research Developments Series)

This book is dedicated to recent and important research on Lie groups. A Lie Group is a group which is also a differentiable manifold, with the property that the group operations are compatible with the smooth structure. They are named after the nineteenth century Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie, who laid the foundations of the theory of continuous transformation groups. Lie groups represent the best developed theory of continuous symmetry of mathematical objects and structures, which makes them indispensable tools for many parts of contemporary mathematics, as well as for modern theoretical physics. They provide a natural framework for analysing the continuous symmetries of differential equations (Differential Galois theory), in much the same way as permutation groups are used in Galois theory for analysing the discrete symmetries of algebraic equations. An extension of Galois theory to the case of continuous symmetry groups was one of Lie's principal motivations.