Death Updated 2025-07-16
Solving differential equations was apparently Lie's original motivation for developing Lie groups. It is therefore likely one of the most understandable ways to approach it.
It appears that Lie's goal was to understand when can a differential equation have an explicitly written solution, much like Galois theory had done for algebraic equations. Both approaches use symmetry as the key tool.
Lie algebra Updated 2025-07-16
Intuitively, a Lie algebra is a simpler object than a Lie group. Without any extra structure, groups can be very complicated non-linear objects. But a Lie algebra is just an algebra over a field, and one with a restricted bilinear map called the Lie bracket, that has to also be alternating and satisfy the Jacobi identity.
Another important way to think about Lie algebras, is as infinitesimal generators.
Because of the Lie group-Lie algebra correspondence, we know that there is almost a bijection between each Lie group and the corresponding Lie algebra. So it makes sense to try and study the algebra instead of the group itself whenever possible, to try and get insight and proofs in that simpler framework. This is the key reason why people study Lie algebras. One is philosophically reminded of how normal subgroups are a simpler representation of group homomorphisms.
To make things even simpler, because all vector spaces of the same dimension on a given field are isomorphic, the only things we need to specify a Lie group through a Lie algebra are:Note that the Lie bracket can look different under different basis of the Lie algebra however. This is shown for example at Physics from Symmetry by Jakob Schwichtenberg (2015) page 71 for the Lorentz group.
As mentioned at Lie Groups, Physics, and Geometry by Robert Gilmore (2008) Chapter 4 "Lie Algebras", taking the Lie algebra around the identity is mostly a convention, we could treat any other point, and things are more or less equivalent.
Continuous symmetry Updated 2025-07-16
Basically a synonym for Lie group which is the way of modelling them.
Representation theory Updated 2025-07-16
Basically, a "representation" means associating each group element as an invertible matrices, i.e. a matrix in (possibly some subset of) , that has the same properties as the group.
Or in other words, associating to the more abstract notion of a group more concrete objects with which we are familiar (e.g. a matrix).
Each such matrix then represents one specific element of the group.
This is basically what everyone does (or should do!) when starting to study Lie groups: we start looking at matrix Lie groups, which are very concrete.
Or more precisely, mapping each group element to a linear map over some vector field (which can be represented by a matrix infinite dimension), in a way that respects the group operations:
As shown at Physics from Symmetry by Jakob Schwichtenberg (2015)
Bibliography:
Cell Updated 2025-07-16
Lebesgue integral vs Riemann integral Updated 2025-07-16
Advantages over Riemann:
Video 1.
Riemann integral vs. Lebesgue integral by The Bright Side Of Mathematics (2018)
Source.
youtube.com/watch?v=PGPZ0P1PJfw&t=808 shows how Lebesgue can be visualized as a partition of the function range instead of domain, and then you just have to be able to measure the size of pre-images.
One advantage of that is that the range is always one dimensional.
But the main advantage is that having infinitely many discontinuities does not matter.
Infinitely many discontinuities can make the Riemann partitioning diverge.
But in Lebesgue, you are instead measuring the size of preimage, and to fit infinitely many discontinuities in a finite domain, the size of this preimage is going to be zero.
So then the question becomes more of "how to define the measure of a subset of the domain".
Which is why we then fall into measure theory!
And then this is why quantum mechanics basically lives in : not being complete makes no sense physically, it would mean that you can get closer and closer to states that don't exist!

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