Mathieu group by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Contains the first sporadic groups discovered by far: 11 and 12 in 1861, and 22, 23 and 24 in 1973. And therefore presumably the simplest! The next sporadic ones discovered were the Janko groups, only in 1965!
Each is a permutation group on elements. There isn't an obvious algorithmic relationship between and the actual group.
TODO initial motivation? Why did Mathieu care about k-transitive groups?
Their; k-transitive group properties seem to be the main characterization, according to Wikipedia:
Looking at the classification of k-transitive groups we see that the Mathieu groups are the only families of 4 and 5 transitive groups other than symmetric groups and alternating groups. 3-transitive is not as nice, so let's just say it is the stabilizer of and be done with it.
Video 1.
Mathieu group section of Why Do Sporadic Groups Exist? by Another Roof (2023)
. Source. Only discusses Mathieu group but is very good at that.
Resonance by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Resonance is a really cool thing.
Examples:
Perhaps a key insight of resonance is that the reonant any lossy system tends to look like the resonance frequency quite quickly even if the initial condition is not the resonant condition itself, because everything that is not the resonant frequency interferes destructively and becomes noise. Some examples of that:
  • striking a bell or drum can be modelled by applying an impuse to the system
  • playing a pipe instrument comes down to blowing a piece that vibrates randomly, and then leads the pipe to vibrate mostly in the resonant frequency. Likely the same applies to bowed string instruments, the bow must be creating a random vibration.
  • playing a plucked string instrument comes down to initializing the system to an triangular wave form and then letting it evolve. TODO find a simulation of that!
Another cool aspect of resonance is that it was kind of the motivation for de Broglie hypothesis, as de Broglie was kind of thinking that electroncs might show discrete jumps on atomic spectra because of constructive interference.
Real projective plane by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
For some reason, Ciro Santilli is mildly obsessed with understanding and visualizing the real projective plane.
To see why this is called a plane, move he center of the sphere to , and project each line passing on the center of the sphere on the x-y plane. This works for all points of the sphere, except those at the equator . Those are the points at infinity. Note that there is one such point at infinity for each direction in the x-y plane.
Their status is a mess as of 2020s, with several systems ongoing. Long live the "original" collegiate university!
Lie algebra by Ciro Santilli 40 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.
Input: a sequence of complex numbers .
Output: another sequence of complex numbers such that:
Intuitively, this means that we are braking up the complex signal into sinusoidal frequencies:
  • : is kind of magic and ends up being a constant added to the signal because
  • : sinusoidal that completes one cycle over the signal. The larger the , the larger the resolution of that sinusoidal. But it completes one cycle regardless.
  • : sinusoidal that completes two cycles over the signal
  • ...
  • : sinusoidal that completes cycles over the signal
and is the amplitude of each sine.
We use Zero-based numbering in our definitions because it just makes every formula simpler.
Motivation: similar to the Fourier transform:
In particular, the discrete Fourier transform is used in signal processing after a analog-to-digital converter. Digital signal processing historically likely grew more and more over analog processing as digital processors got faster and faster as it gives more flexibility in algorithm design.
Sample software implementations:
Figure 1.
DFT of with 25 points
. This is a simple example of a discrete Fourier transform for a real input signal. It illustrates how the DFT takes N complex numbers as input, and produces N complex numbers as output. It also illustrates how the discrete Fourier transform of a real signal is symmetric around the center point.
The orthogonal group has 2 connected components:
It is instructive to visualize how the looks like in :
  • you take the first basis vector and move it to any other. You have therefore two angular parameters.
  • you take the second one, and move it to be orthogonal to the first new vector. (you can choose a circle around the first new vector, and so you have another angular parameter.
  • at last, for the last one, there are only two choices that are orthogonal to both previous ones, one in each direction. It is this directio, relative to the others, that determines the "has a reflection or not" thing
As a result it is isomorphic to the direct product of the special orthogonal group by the cyclic group of order 2:
A low dimensional example:
because you can only do two things: to flip or not to flip the line around zero.
Note that having the determinant plus or minus 1 is not a definition: there are non-orthogonal groups with determinant plus or minus 1. This is just a property. E.g.:
has determinant 1, but:
so is not orthogonal.
The normal navigation to them was paywalled, but the static files are served without login checks if you know their URL. One way to go about it is to search by prefix on the Wayback Machine: web.archive.org/web/*/https://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/contentblock/2011/06/03/*
The last handbooks we can find are 2020/2021, they might have move to a new more properly paywalled location after that year.
Representation theory by Ciro Santilli 40 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:
users.physics.ox.ac.uk/~lvovsky/B3/ contain assorted PDFs from between 2015 and 2019
Syllabus reads:
Professor in 2000s seems to be
But as of 2023 marked emeritus, so who took over?
Ewart is actually religious:
This dude is pure trouble for Oxford!

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