In this one-dimensional setting, a commutative formal group law over a commutative ring is a formal power series with
In particular terms of total degree at least two. There is a unique formal inverse ; coefficient recursion solves .
A morphism from formal group law to is satisfying
The invertible morphism criterion for formal group laws is
Necessity follows by differentiating at zero for an inverse . Conversely, write with a unit. In constructing , the coefficient of fixes ; at degree , the equation has the form an already known expression . This determines every over . The same construction gives an inverse on the other side, and uniqueness makes the two inverses agree. Finally apply to the morphism identity with to obtain
Thus the inverse is itself a morphism of formal group laws, not merely an inverse formal power series. Over a general ring, nonzero derivative is insufficient: it must be a unit.
A Noetherian ring is a ring whose ideals satisfy the ascending chain condition; equivalently every ideal is finitely generated. For the surjective ring endomorphism, put . The ascending chain of ideals stabilizes, say . If , surjectivity of gives with . Then , so and . The endomorphism is therefore injective, hence a ring automorphism.
The nilradical is the ideal
For example, if , the binomial expansion gives ; multiplication by any ring element also preserves nilpotence. Every prime ideal contains each nilpotent element, since implies . Conversely, if is not nilpotent, the multiplicative subset avoids . By Zorn's lemma, choose an ideal maximal among those disjoint from this subset. It is a prime ideal: if but neither factor is in , then and both meet the subset, and multiplying their two witnesses puts a power of in , a contradiction. This prime ideal excludes . Hence
For the zero ring the empty intersection is the whole ring, as required.
Here is a finite prime-intersection representation of a radical argument that does not assume the result. In a Noetherian ring, suppose some ideal has ideal radical not expressible as a finite intersection of prime ideals, and choose such a maximal by the ascending chain condition. It is proper and cannot be prime. Choose with . The two larger ideals and have finite prime-intersection radicals, and
Indeed, if and , then . This contradicts the choice of . Applying the result to proves that is the intersection of finitely many prime ideals. Empty intersections handle the unit ideal.
For reducedness of a formal power series ring, the inclusion of constants gives one implication: a nonzero nilpotent element of remains nonzero and nilpotent in . For the other, let be a reduced ring and take a nonzero formal power series with . The coefficient of in is , because is reduced. Thus is not nilpotent. Therefore
No Noetherian ring hypothesis is needed for this argument.
For a nilradical that is not nilpotent, take
Every element of this ideal uses finitely many variables and is nilpotent: an element using variables lies in an ideal whose st power is zero. The quotient by this ideal is the field , so it is exactly the nilradical. Nevertheless for every , because the square-free monomials form a vector space basis. Thus for all .
Introduce a parameter to keep track of total degree. The power series for the matrix exponential gives
Set and , where the commutator is . Expanding a second matrix exponential gives
Since
the two expressions agree through total degree two. More explicitly, applying the local matrix logarithm to the first expansion gives . This proves the displayed order of the Baker--Campbell--Hausdorff formula. The Lie algebra is closed under the commutator, so its displayed exponent lies in the same Lie algebra. The expansion is a formal power series identity, or a convergent identity sufficiently near the identity matrix; this argument does not assert unrestricted global convergence.
The next two terms of the Baker--Campbell--Hausdorff formula are the two cubic commutators:
Here means total degree at least four in . If one continues by one more degree, the quartic contribution is .
For the Pauli matrices, use the Pauli matrix multiplication law
Put . The antisymmetric term disappears when contracted with , so . Consequently every even power of equals , and every odd power equals . Splitting the matrix exponential into even and odd terms of its power series yields
The Pauli matrices are Hermitian matrices, and the components of are real, so . For real , the resulting matrix satisfies
Also and , so its two eigenvalues are . The eigenvalues of are therefore , whose product is one. Thus is a unitary matrix with determinant one: it belongs to the SU(2) group.
Multiplying the two exact Pauli matrix exponentials, and using , gives
In particular, the term has a minus sign. Its quadratic Taylor expansion is
Taking , , the Pauli matrix commutator identity gives . The quadratic exponent in the Baker--Campbell--Hausdorff formula is therefore . In , only the linear part of contributes to through degree two. The anticommutator gives , reproducing the exact product's quadratic expansion.
The character of a representation is its trace. The exterior power character is the elementary symmetric polynomial of degree in the eigenvalues, so the specified sign convention gives
To obtain the character generating series of symmetric powers, sum the monomial eigenvalues over all degrees. As an identity of formal power series,
The apparent negative powers cancel in the denominator, which has constant term . Equivalently, this series is the reciprocal of . Comparing coefficients gives for , an explicit recurrence computing the symmetric-power characters from .
Here a formal group means a one-dimensional commutative formal group law. Over a ring , it is a formal power series satisfying
In particular, terms of total degree at least . A formal inverse with is obtained recursively. An isomorphism of formal group laws from to is a series with invertible linear coefficient and
Its compositional inverse exists over by coefficient recursion.
For , all these series converge on ; the operations preserve that set and make it the group . Use the uniformizer and normalize the valuation by , and write .
We explicitly construct its formal logarithm. Define
Then put
This is a formal series over with linear coefficient . Differentiating associativity in its last variable at gives
It follows that the -derivative of is , the same as that of . Evaluating at therefore proves
The differential is the invariant differential of a formal group law.
Choose an integer . In degree , the coefficient of has valuation at least . Thus the scaled series
has
Here , and the coefficient valuations tend to infinity. Consequently with a convergent integral power series on . Such a series is -Lipschitz. For any , the equation is equivalent to , a strict contraction, to which the contraction mapping theorem applies on the complete ring . It has exactly one solution.
The deep logarithm subgroup of a formal group is obtained as follows. The formal group exponential is the formal compositional inverse of , obtained recursively; equivalently it solves , with . The preceding contraction, applied to the scaled series, constructs its convergent inverse on and agrees with that formal inverse. This supplies the required convergence sketch for as well as a bijectivity proof for the logarithm.
The integral formal law and inverse preserve , so this is a subgroup. The logarithm identity and bijectivity give
Reduction of the formal law modulo has kernel . Its underlying image set is , which has size , where . Thus this subgroup has finite index, explicitly .
Yes: is Noetherian. We prove Noetherianity of a formal power series ring directly, using only the equivalence in part (a). Let , a formal power series ring, and fix an ideal . For , let be the set of coefficients of in elements of . It is an ideal of , because coefficient extraction is additive and respects multiplication by constants. Multiplication by gives
Since is Noetherian, there is an with for all . Each , for , has a finite generating set of an ideal . Choose whose coefficient of is . If , use no generators at that index.
We claim that these finitely many generate over . Given , start with and recursively construct . For , express the coefficient of in as , with , and subtract to obtain . For , use and subtract
to cancel that coefficient. Every step involves a finite sum and leaves a residual still in .
For each , define the formal power series
The residual after the th cancellation lies in , so comparison of each coefficient gives the exact identity
The right side is a finite -linear combination of the chosen generators. No assertion that arbitrary ideals are closed under limits is being used: the equality is verified coefficient by coefficient, and the multipliers belong to . Thus every ideal of is finitely generated, proving
Power series Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
A power series combines a sequence of coefficients with monomials in the displacement from a fixed centre:
The variable , centre , and coefficients can be real numbers or complex numbers. Its degree- partial sum is a polynomial, so a convergent power series can turn a complicated function into increasingly accurate finite calculations. Convergence, and the error after stopping, are essential parts of that claim.
The geometric series supplies the simplest computed example:
At , stopping after degree ten gives , differing from the exact value by . At , the same degree gives only about instead of . The same formula has very different practical accuracy at different points; the geometric power-series remainder quantifies it.
The structure is useful beyond numerical evaluation. Within its radius of convergence, termwise differentiation of a power series turns a question about a derivative into a question about coefficients. A Taylor series chooses when it represents the function locally. A formal power series instead uses the coefficients algebraically, without asserting numerical convergence; the existing generating function examples use that distinction to encode counting problems.
Let be a complete discrete valuation ring of residue characteristic of a field , with maximal ideal , and let be a one-dimensional formal group law over . Its multiplication series is . If , the invertible morphism criterion for formal group laws constructs its inverse with coefficients in . Both formal power series converge on , since their coefficients are integral and the powers of an element of tend to zero. Their compositions are the identity there. Thus multiplication by is bijective, including when and is odd. Every finite-order element of consequently has order of a group element equal to a prime power with prime .
Let be a commutative unital ring and with a unit. Set . The coefficient of in gives . At every degree , the coefficient is plus an expression involving only ; choose to cancel that expression. This gives a unique right compositional inverse of a formal power series.
Similarly, the coefficient of in is plus previously fixed terms, so the same recursion gives a left inverse . Composition of zero-constant-term formal power series is associative, since every coefficient involves finitely many terms. Therefore , proving .
At an unramified irregular singular point with distinct leading eigenvalues, a sectorial fundamental solution is a fundamental matrix whose entries are holomorphic functions asymptotic to a prescribed formal matrix on a sector of the logarithm cover. For competing cubic exponentials, the usual construction uses six overlapping sectors with basic angle . A formal power series need not converge, and two sectorial realizations may differ by exponentially small terms across a sector boundary.
Put and . A free resolution has countably many generators and relations . Applying the Hom functor with coefficients in gives on sequence products. This is surjective: for prescribed use , a well-defined formal power series. Therefore the degree-one Ext functor vanishes. But , since every image is infinitely divisible by . A nonzero projective module has a nonzero coordinate map into , so is not projective. Its displayed resolution proves that its projective dimension is exactly one. The finite-generation hypothesis in top Ext detects finite projective dimension is essential.