The Atlas of Lie Groups and Representations

Event time: 
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - 11:15am to 12:15pm
Location: 
215 LOM
Speaker: 
Jeffrey Adams
Speaker affiliation: 
University of Maryland
Event description: 

One of the fundamental problems in the theory of Lie groups
is to classify the Unitary Dual of a group $G$: the irreducible representations of $G$, acting on a (typically infinite dimensional) Hilbert space, preserving the inner product. This is a very difficult problem, unsolved except in some special cases, and the answer is known to be very complicated.

The primary goal of the Atlas project is to compute the Unitary Dual by computer, even though it is not obvious there is a finite algorithm in principle, not to mention in practice. An important auxiliary goal is to provide software for doing computations in Lie theory and
representation theory.

I’ll discuss the current state of the project, in broad terms, and talk about what we’ve learned by rethinking our entire subject in computational terms.