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.
- www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael_Frewer/publication/269465435_Lie-Groups_as_a_Tool_for_Solving_Differential_Equations/links/548cbf250cf214269f20e267/Lie-Groups-as-a-Tool-for-Solving-Differential-Equations.pdf Lie-Groups as a Tool for Solving Differential Equations by Michael Frewer. Slides with good examples.
Bibliography:
A single exponential map is not enough to recover a simple Lie group from its algebra by 
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16The most important example is perhaps and , both of which have the same Lie algebra, but are not isomorphic.
More precisely, each generator of the corresponding Lie algebra leads to one separate conserved current, such that a single symmetry can lead to multiple conserved currents.
This is basically the local symmetry version of Noether's theorem.
Then to maintain charge conservation, we have to maintain local symmetry, which in turn means we have to add a gauge field as shown at Video "Deriving the qED Lagrangian by Dietterich Labs (2018)".
Bibliography:
- photonics101.com/relativistic-electrodynamics/gauge-invariance-action-charge-conservation#show-solution has a good explanation of the Gauge transformation. TODO how does that relate to symmetry?
- physics.stackexchange.com/questions/57901/noether-theorem-gauge-symmetry-and-conservation-of-charge
This important and common simple case has easy properties.
S page 146.
The one parameter subgroup of a Lie group for a given element of its Lie algebra is a subgroup of given by:
Intuitively, is a direction, and is how far we move along a given direction. This intuition is especially vivid in for example in the case of the Lie algebra of , the rotation group.
One parameter subgroups can be seen as the continuous analogue to the cycle of an element of a group.
Non-invertible are excluded "because" otherwise it would not form a group (every element must have an inverse). This is therefore the largest possible group under matrix multiplication, other matrix multiplication groups being subgroups of it.
general linear group over a finite field of order . Remember that due to the classification of finite fields, there is one single field for each prime power .
Exactly as over the real numbers, you just put the finite field elements into a matrix, and then take the invertible ones.
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
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