Category: noncommutative

Toposes alive and kicking at IHES

Published October 8, 2016 by lievenlb

After 50 years, vivid interest in topos theory seems to have returned to one of the most prestigious research institutes, the IHES. Last november, there was the meeting Topos a l’IHES.

At the meeting, Celine Loozen filmed a documentary which is supposed to have as its title “Unifying Worlds”. Its very classy trailer is now on YouTube (via +David Roberts).

How did topos theory, a topic considered by most to be far too abstract to be useful to main stream mathematics, suddenly return in such force?

It always helps when a couple of world-class mathematicians become interest in the topic, for their own particular reasons. Clearly, the topic gathers considerable momentum if these people are all permanent members of the IHES.

A lot of geometric information is contained in the category of all sheaves on the geometric object. Topos theory offers a way to construct ‘geometries’ out of nothing, that is, out of arbitrary categories.

Take your favourite category $\mathbf{C}$, then “presheaves” on $\mathbf{C}$ are defined to be contravariant functors $\mathbf{C} \rightarrow \mathbf{Sets}$. For any Grothendieck topology on $\mathbf{C}$ one can then restrict to the sub-category of “sheaves” for this topology, and that’s your typical topos.

Alain Connes got interested in topos theory because he observed that even for the most trivial of categories, such as the monoid category with just one object and endomorphisms the multiplicative semigroup $\mathbb{N}_{\geq 1}^{\times}$, and taking the coarsest of all Grothendieck topologies, one gets interesting objects of baffling complexity.

One of the ‘invariants’ one can associate to a topos is its collection of “points”. Together with Katia Consani, Connes computed in Geometry of the Arithmetic Site that the collection of points of this simple presheaf topos is exactly the set of adele classes $\mathbb{Q}^{\ast}_+ \backslash \mathbb{A}^f_{\mathbb{Q}} / \hat{\mathbb{Z}}^{\ast}$.

Here’s what Connes himself said about this revelation (followed by an attempted translation):

——————————————————

(50.36)

And,in this example, we saw the wonderful notion of a topos, developed by Grothendieck.

It was sufficient for me to open SGA4, a book written at the beginning of the 60ties or the late fifties.

It was sufficient for me to open SGA4 to see that all the things that I needed were there, say, how to construct a cohomology on this site, how to develop things, how to see that the category of sheaves of Abelian groups is an Abelian category, having sufficient injective objects, and so on … all those things were there.

This is really remarkable, because what does it mean?

It means that the average mathematician says: “topos = a generalised topological space and I will never need to use such things. Well, there is the etale cohomology and I can use it to make sense of simply connected spaces and, bon, there’s the chrystaline cohomology, which is already a bit more complicated, but I will never need it, so I can safely ignore it.”

And (s)he puts the notion of a topos in a certain category of things which are generalisations of things, developed only to be generalisations…

But in fact, reality is completely different!

In our work with Katia Consani we saw not only that there is this epicyclic topos, but in fact, this epicyclic topos lies over a site, which we call the arithmetic site, which itself is of a delirious simplicity.

It relies only on the natural numbers, viewed multiplicatively.

That is, one takes a small category consisting of just one object, having this monoid as its endomorphisms, and one considers the corresponding topos.

This appears well … infantile, but nevertheless, this object conceils many wonderful things.

And we would have never discovered those things, if we hadn’t had the general notion of what a topos is, of what a point of a topos is, in terms of flat functors, etc. etc.

(52.27)

——————————————————-

Pierre Cartier has a very wide interest in mathematical theories, the wilder the better: Witt rings, motifs, cosmic Galois groups, toposes…

He must have been one of the first people to speak about toposes at the Bourbaki seminar. In february 1978 he gave the talk Logique, categories et faisceaux, d’apres F. Lawvere et M. Tierney (and dedicated to Grothendieck’s 50th birthday).

He also gave the opening lecture of the Topos a l’IHES conference.

In this fragment of an interview with Stephane Dugowson and Anatole Khelif in 2014 he plays down his own role in the development of topos theory, compared to his contributions in other fields, such as motifs.

——————————————————-

(46:24)

Well, I didn’t invest much time in topos theory.

Except, I once gave a talk at the Bourbaki seminar on the use of topos theory in logic, such as the independence of the axiom of choice, that is, on the idea of forcing.

But, it was just this talk, I didn’t do anything original in it.

Then there is nonstandard analysis, where one can formulate certain things in terms of topos theory. When I got interested in nonstandard analysis, I had this possible application of topos theory in mind.

At the moment when you have a nonstandard model of the integers or more generally of set theory, then one has two models of set theory, that is two different toposes, and then one obviously tries to compare them.

In that sense, I was completely aware of the fact that everything I was doing could be expressed in the language of toposes,or at least in the philosophy of toposes.

I haven’t made any important contributions in that theory, for me it merely remained a tool.

(47:49)

——————————————————-

Laurent Lafforgue says he spend hundredths and hundredths of hours talking to Olivia Caramello about topos theory.

She must have been quite convincing. The last couple of years Lafforgue is a fierce advocate of Caramello’s work.

Her basic idea is that the same topos can arise from two very different mathematical settings (that is, two different categories with Grothendieck topologies can have equivalent categories of sheaves).

The hope then is to translate results from one theory to the other, or as she expresses it, toposes can be used as “bridges” between different mathematical topics.

At the moment though, is seems a bit far fetched for this idea to be relevant to the Langlands programme.

Caramello and Lafforgue have just a paper out: Sur la dualit´e des topos et de leurs pr´esentations et ses applications : une introduction.

The paper is based on a lecture Lafforgue gave in April in Nantes. Here’s the video:

In the introduction they write:

“It is our conviction that the theory of toposes and their representations, with its essential and structural ambiguity, is destined to have an impact on mathematics comparable to the impact group theory has had from the moment, some decades after its discovery by Galois, the mathematical community began to understand it.”

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A noncommutative moduli space

Published July 19, 2014 by lievenlb

Supernatural numbers also appear in noncommutative geometry via James Glimm’s characterisation of a class of simple $C^*$-algebras, the UHF-algebras.

A uniformly hyperfine (or, UHF) algebra $A$ is a $C^*$-algebra that can be written as the closure, in the norm topology, of an increasing union of finite-dimensional full matrix algebras

$M_{c_1}(\mathbb{C}) \subset M_{c_2}(\mathbb{C}) \subset … \quad \subset A$

Such embedding are only possible if the matrix-sizes divide each other, that is $c_1 | c_2 | c_3 | … $, and we can assign to $A$ the supernatural number $s=\prod_i c_i$ and denote $A=A(s)$.

In his paper On a certain class of operator algebras, Glimm proved that two UHF-algebras $A(s)$ and $B(t)$ are isomorphic as $C^*$-algebras if and only if $s=t$. That is, the supernatural numbers $\mathbb{S}$ are precisely the isomorphism classes of UHF-algebras.

An important invariant, the Grothendieck group $K_0$ of $A(s)$, can be described as the additive subgroup $\mathbb{Q}(s)$ of $\mathbb{Q}$ generated by all fractions of the form $\frac{1}{n}$ where $n$ is a positive integer dividing $s$.

A “noncommutative space” is a Morita class of $C^*$-algebras, so we want to know when two $UHF$-algebras $A(s)$ and $B(t)$ are Morita-equivalent. This turns out to be the case when there are positive integers $n$ and $m$ such that $n.s = m.t$, or equivalently when the $K_0$’s $\mathbb{Q}(s)$ and $\mathbb{Q}(t)$ are isomorphic as additive subgroups of $\mathbb{Q}$.

Thus Morita-equivalence defines an equivalence relation on $\mathbb{S}$ as follows: if $s=\prod p^{s_p}$ and $t= \prod p^{t_p}$ then $s \sim t$ if and only if the following two properties are satisfied:

(1): $s_p = \infty$ iff $t_p= \infty$, and

(2): $s_p=t_p$ for all but finitely many primes $p$.

That is, we can view the equivalence classes $\mathbb{S}/\sim$ as the moduli space of noncommutative spaces associated to UHF-algebras!

Now, the equivalence relation is described in terms of isomorphism classes of additive subgroups of the rationals, which was precisely the characterisation of isomorphism classes of points in the arithmetic site, that is, the finite adèle classes

$\mathbb{S}/\sim~\simeq~\mathbb{Q}^* \backslash \mathbb{A}^f_{\mathbb{Q}} / \widehat{\mathbb{Z}}^*$

and as the induced topology of $\mathbb{A}^f_{\mathbb{Q}}$ on it is trivial, this “space” is usually thought of as a noncommutative space.

That is, $\mathbb{S}/\sim$ is a noncommutative moduli space of noncommutative spaces defined by UHF-algebras.

The finite integers form one equivalence class, corresponding to the fact that the finite dimensional UHF-algebras $M_n(\mathbb{C})$ are all Morita-equivalent to $\mathbb{C}$, or a bit more pompous, that the Brauer group $Br(\mathbb{C})$ is trivial.

Multiplication of supernaturals induces a well defined multiplication on equivalence classes, and, with that multiplication we can view $\mathbb{S}/\sim$ as the ‘Brauer-monoid’ $Br_{\infty}(\mathbb{C})$ of simple UHF-algebras…

(Btw. the photo of James Glimm above was taken by George Bergman in 1972)

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Quiver Grassmannians can be anything

Published May 2, 2013 by lievenlb

A standard Grassmannian $Gr(m,V)$ is the manifold having as its points all possible $m$-dimensional subspaces of a given vectorspace $V$. As an example, $Gr(1,V)$ is the set of lines through the origin in $V$ and therefore is the projective space $\mathbb{P}(V)$. Grassmannians are among the nicest projective varieties, they are smooth and allow a cell decomposition.

A quiver $Q$ is just an oriented graph. Here’s an example

A representation $V$ of a quiver assigns a vector-space to each vertex and a linear map between these vertex-spaces to every arrow. As an example, a representation $V$ of the quiver $Q$ consists of a triple of vector-spaces $(V_1,V_2,V_3)$ together with linear maps $f_a~:~V_2 \rightarrow V_1$ and $f_b,f_c~:~V_2 \rightarrow V_3$.

A sub-representation $W \subset V$ consists of subspaces of the vertex-spaces of $V$ and linear maps between them compatible with the maps of $V$. The dimension-vector of $W$ is the vector with components the dimensions of the vertex-spaces of $W$.

This means in the example that we require $f_a(W_2) \subset W_1$ and $f_b(W_2)$ and $f_c(W_2)$ to be subspaces of $W_3$. If the dimension of $W_i$ is $m_i$ then $m=(m_1,m_2,m_3)$ is the dimension vector of $W$.

The quiver-analogon of the Grassmannian $Gr(m,V)$ is the Quiver Grassmannian $QGr(m,V)$ where $V$ is a quiver-representation and $QGr(m,V)$ is the collection of all possible sub-representations $W \subset V$ with fixed dimension-vector $m$. One might expect these quiver Grassmannians to be rather nice projective varieties.

However, last week Markus Reineke posted a 2-page note on the arXiv proving that every projective variety is a quiver Grassmannian.

Let’s illustrate the argument by finding a quiver Grassmannian $QGr(m,V)$ isomorphic to the elliptic curve in $\mathbb{P}^2$ with homogeneous equation $Y^2Z=X^3+Z^3$.

Consider the Veronese embedding $\mathbb{P}^2 \rightarrow \mathbb{P}^9$ obtained by sending a point $(x:y:z)$ to the point

\[ (x^3:x^2y:x^2z:xy^2:xyz:xz^2:y^3:y^2z:yz^2:z^3) \]

The upshot being that the elliptic curve is now realized as the intersection of the image of $\mathbb{P}^2$ with the hyper-plane $\mathbb{V}(X_0-X_7+X_9)$ in the standard projective coordinates $(x_0:x_1:\cdots:x_9)$ for $\mathbb{P}^9$.

To describe the equations of the image of $\mathbb{P}^2$ in $\mathbb{P}^9$ consider the $6 \times 3$ matrix with the rows corresponding to $(x^2,xy,xz,y^2,yz,z^2)$ and the columns to $(x,y,z)$ and the entries being the multiplications, that is

$$\begin{bmatrix} x^3 & x^2y & x^2z \\ x^2y & xy^2 & xyz \\ x^2z & xyz & xz^2 \\ xy^2 & y^3 & y^2z \\ xyz & y^2z & yz^2 \\ xz^2 & yz^2 & z^3 \end{bmatrix} = \begin{bmatrix} x_0 & x_1 & x_2 \\ x_1 & x_3 & x_4 \\ x_2 & x_4 & x_5 \\ x_3 & x_6 & x_7 \\ x_4 & x_7 & x_8 \\ x_5 & x_8 & x_9 \end{bmatrix}$$

But then, a point $(x_0:x_1: \cdots : x_9)$ belongs to the image of $\mathbb{P}^2$ if (and only if) the matrix on the right-hand side has rank $1$ (that is, all its $2 \times 2$ minors vanish). Next, consider the quiver

and consider the representation $V=(V_1,V_2,V_3)$ with vertex-spaces $V_1=\mathbb{C}$, $V_2 = \mathbb{C}^{10}$ and $V_2 = \mathbb{C}^6$. The linear maps $x,y$ and $z$ correspond to the columns of the matrix above, that is

$$(x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3,x_4,x_5,x_6,x_7,x_8,x_9) \begin{cases} \rightarrow^x~(x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3,x_4,x_5) \\ \rightarrow^y~(x_1,x_3,x_4,x_6,x_7,x_8) \\ \rightarrow^z~(x_2,x_4,x_5,x_7,x_8,x_9) \end{cases}$$

The linear map $h~:~\mathbb{C}^{10} \rightarrow \mathbb{C}$ encodes the equation of the hyper-plane, that is $h=x_0-x_7+x_9$.

Now consider the quiver Grassmannian $QGr(m,V)$ for the dimension vector $m=(0,1,1)$. A base-vector $p=(x_0,\cdots,x_9)$ of $W_2 = \mathbb{C}p$ of a subrepresentation $W=(0,W_2,W_3) \subset V$ must be such that $h(x)=0$, that is, $p$ determines a point of the hyper-plane.

Likewise the vectors $x(p),y(p)$ and $z(p)$ must all lie in the one-dimensional space $W_3 = \mathbb{C}$, that is, the right-hand side matrix above must have rank one and hence $p$ is a point in the image of $\mathbb{P}^2$ under the Veronese.

That is, $Gr(m,V)$ is isomorphic to the intersection of this image with the hyper-plane and hence is isomorphic to the elliptic curve.

The general case is similar as one can view any projective subvariety $X \rightarrow \mathbb{P}^n$ as isomorphic to the intersection of the image of a specific $d$-uple Veronese embedding $\mathbb{P}^n \rightarrow \mathbb{P}^N$ with a number of hyper-planes in $\mathbb{P}^N$.

ADDED For those desperate to read the original comments-section, here’s the link.

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noncommutative geometry at the Lorentz center

Published March 24, 2012 by lievenlb

This week i was at the conference Noncommutative Algebraic Geometry and its Applications to Physics at the Lorentz center in Leiden.

It was refreshing to go to a conference where i knew only a handful of people beforehand and where everything was organized to Oberwolfach perfection. Perhaps i’ll post someday on some of the (to me) more interesting talks.

Also interesting were some discussions about the Elsevier-boycot-fallout and proposals to go beyong that boycot and i will certainly post about that later. At the moment there is still an embargo on some information, but anticipate a statement from the editorial board of the journal of number theory soon…

I was asked to talk about “algebraic D-branes”, probably because it sounded like an appropriate topic for a conference on noncommutative algebraic geometry claiming to have connections with physics. I saw it as an excuse to promote the type of noncommutative geometry i like based on representation schemes.

If you like to see the slides of my talk you can find the handout-version here. They should be pretty self-exploratory, but if you like to read an unedited version of what i intended to tell with every slide you can find that text here.

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Manin’s three-space-2000

Published January 30, 2012 by lievenlb

Almost three decades ago, Yuri Manin submitted the paper “New dimensions in geometry” to the 25th Arbeitstagung, Bonn 1984. It is published in its proceedings, Springer Lecture Notes in Mathematics 1111, 59-101 and there’s a review of the paper available online in the Bulletin of the AMS written by Daniel Burns.

In the introduction Manin makes some highly speculative but inspiring conjectures. He considers the ring

$$\mathbb{Z}[x_1,\ldots,x_m;\xi_1,\ldots,\xi_n]$$

where $\mathbb{Z}$ are the integers, the $\xi_i$ are the “odd” variables anti-commuting among themselves and commuting with the “even” variables $x_j$. To this ring, Manin wants to associate a geometric object of dimension $1+m+n$ where $1$ refers to the “arithmetic dimension”, $m$ to the ordinary geometric dimensions $(x_1,\ldots,x_m)$ and $n$ to the new “odd dimensions” represented by the coordinates $(\xi_1,\ldots,\xi_n)$. Manin writes :

“Before the advent of ringed spaces in the fifties it would have been difficult to say precisely what me mean when we speak about this geometric object. Nowadays we simply define it as an “affine superscheme”, an object of the category of topological spaces locally ringed by a sheaf of $\mathbb{Z}_2$-graded supercommutative rings.”

Here’s my own image (based on Mumford’s depiction of $\mathsf{Spec}(\mathbb{Z}[x])$) of what Manin calls the three-space-2000, whose plain $x$-axis is supplemented by the set of primes and by the “black arrow”, corresponding to the odd dimension.

Manin speculates : “The message of the picture is intended to be the following metaphysics underlying certain recent developments in geometry: all three types of geometric dimensions are on an equal footing”.

Probably, by the addition “2000” Manin meant that by the year 2000 we would as easily switch between these three types of dimensions as we were able to draw arithmetic schemes in the mid-80ties. Quod non.

Twelve years into the new millenium we are only able to decode fragments of this. We know that symmetric algebras and exterior algebras (that is the “even” versus the “odd” dimensions) are related by Koszul duality, and that the precise relationship between the arithmetic axis and the geometric axis is the holy grail of geometry over the field with one element.

For aficionados of $\mathbb{F}_1$ there’s this gem by Manin to contemplate :

“Does there exist a group, mixing the arithmetic dimension with the (even) geometric ones?”

Way back in 1984 Manin conjectured : “There is no such group naively, but a ‘category of representations of this group’ may well exist. There may exist also certain correspondence rings (or their representations) between $\mathsf{Spec}(\mathbb{Z})$ and $x$.”

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how noncommutative geometry shot itself

Published December 31, 2011 by lievenlb

I’ve never apologized for prolonged periods of blogsilence and have no intention to start now.

But, sometimes you need to expose the things holding you back before you can turn the page and (hopefully) start afresh.

Long time readers of this blog know I’ve often warned against group-think, personality cults and the making of exaggerate claims as possible threats to the survival of noncommutative geometry (for example in the group think post).

However, I was totally unprepared for this comment left on the noncommutative geometry blog, begin October:

Noncommutative Geometry is a field whose history is unpredictable.
When should I expect the pickaxe? Yours, Leon Trotsky

After sharing this on Google+ someone emailed suggesting I’d better have a look at some ‘semi-secret’ blogs. I did spend the better part of that friday going through more than 3 years worth of blogposts and cried my eyes out.

It is sad to read a message in a bottle and notice that after more than two years the matter is still far from resolved.

I wish you all a healing and liberating 2012!

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Prep-notes dump

Published December 21, 2011 by lievenlb

Here are the scans of my crude prep-notes for some of the later seminar-talks. These notes still contain mistakes, most of them were corrected during the talks. So, please, read these notes with both mercy are caution!

Hurwitz formula imples ABC : The proof of Smirnov’s argument, but modified so that one doesn’t require an $\epsilon$-term. This is known to be impossible in the number-theory case, but a possible explanation might be that not all of the Smirnov-maps $q~:~\mathsf{Spec}(\mathbb{Z}) \rightarrow \mathbb{P}^1_{\mathbb{F}_1}$ are actually covers.

Frobenius lifts and representation rings : Faithfully flat descent allows us to view torsion-free $\mathbb{Z}$-rings with a family of commuting Frobenius lifts (aka $\lambda$-rings) as algebras over the field with one element $\mathbb{F}_1$. We give several examples including the two structures on $\mathbb{Z}[x]$ and Adams operations as Frobenius lifts on representation rings $R(G)$ of finite groups. We give an example that this extra structure may separate groups having the same character table. In general this is not the case, the magic Google search term is ‘Brauer pairs’.

Big Witt vectors and Burnside rings : Because the big Witt vectors functor $W(-)$ is adjoint to the tensor-functor $- \otimes_{\mathbb{F}_1} \mathbb{Z}$ we can view the geometrical object associated to $W(A)$ as the $\mathbb{F}_1$-scheme determined by the arithmetical scheme with coordinate ring $A$. We describe the construction of $\Lambda(A)$ and describe the relation between $W(\mathbb{Z})$ and the (completion of the) Burnside ring of the infinite cyclic group.

Density theorems and the Galois-site of $\mathbb{F}_1$ : We recall standard density theorems (Frobenius, Chebotarev) in number theory and use them in combination with the Kronecker-Weber theorem to prove the result due to James Borger and Bart de Smit on the etale site of $\mathsf{Spec}(\mathbb{F}_1)$.

New geometry coming from $\mathbb{F}_1$ : This is a more speculative talk trying to determine what new features come up when we view an arithmetic scheme over $\mathbb{F}_1$. It touches on the geometric meaning of dual-coalgebras, the Habiro-structure sheaf and Habiro-topology associated to $\mathbb{P}^1_{\mathbb{Z}}$ and tries to extend these notions to more general settings. These scans are unintentionally made mysterious by the fact that the bottom part is blacked out (due to the fact they got really wet and dried horribly). In case you want more info, contact me.

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3 related new math-sites

Published September 14, 2011 by lievenlb

F_un Mathematics

Hardly a ‘new’ blog, but one that is getting a new life! On its old homepage you’ll find a diagonal banner stating ‘This site has moved’ and clicking on it will guide you to its new location : cage.ugent.be/~kthas/Fun.

From now on, this site will be hosted at the University of Ghent and maintained by Koen Thas. So, please update your bookmarks and point your RSS-aggregator to the new feed.

Everyone interested in contributing to this blog dedicated to the mathematics of the field with one element should contact Koen by email.

angst

Though I may occasionally (cross)post at F_un mathematics, my own blog-life will center round a new blog to accompany the master-course ‘seminar noncommutative geometry’ I’m running at Antwerp University this semester. Its URL is noncommutative.org and it is called :

Here, angs is short for Antwerp Noncommutative Geometry Seminar and the additions @t resp. + are there to indicate we will experiment a bit trying to find useful interactions between the IRL seminar, its blog and social media such as twitter and Google+.

The seminar (and blog) are scheduled to start in earnest september 30th, but I may post some prep-notes already. This semester the seminar will try to decode Smirnov’s old idea to prove the ABC-conjecture in number theory via geometry over the field with one element and connect it with new ideas such as Borger’s $\mathbb{F}_1$-geometry using $\lambda$-rings and noncommutative ideas proposed by Connes, Consani and Marcolli.

Again, anyone willing to contribute actively is invited to send me an email or to comment on ‘angst’, tweet about it using the hashtag #angs (all such tweets will appear on the frontpage) or share its posts on Google+.

Noncommutative Arithmetic Geometry Media Library

Via the noncommutative geometry blog a new initiative maintained by Alain Connes and Katia Consani was announced : the Noncommutative Arithmetic Geometry Media Library.

This site is dedicated to maintain articles, videos, and news about meetings and activities related to noncommutative arithmetic geometry. The website is still `under construction’ and the plan is to gradually add more videos (also from past conferences and meetings), as well as papers and slides.

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Penrose tilings and noncommutative geometry

Published May 18, 2011 by lievenlb

Penrose tilings are aperiodic tilings of the plane, made from 2 sort of tiles : kites and darts. It is well known (see for example the standard textbook tilings and patterns section 10.5) that one can describe a Penrose tiling around a given point in the plane as an infinite sequence of 0’s and 1’s, subject to the condition that no two consecutive 1’s appear in the sequence. Conversely, any such sequence is the sequence of a Penrose tiling together with a point. Moreover, if two such sequences are eventually the same (that is, they only differ in the first so many terms) then these sequences belong to two points in the same tiling,

Another remarkable feature of Penrose tilings is their local isomorphism : fix a finite region around a point in one tiling, then in any other Penrose tiling one can find a point having an isomorphic region around it. For this reason, the space of all Penrose tilings has horrible topological properties (all points lie in each others closure) and is therefore a prime test-example for the techniques of noncommutative geometry.

In his old testament, Noncommutative Geometry, Alain Connes associates to this space a $C^*$-algebra $Fib$ (because it is constructed from the Fibonacci series $F_0,F_1,F_2,…$) which is the direct limit of sums of two full matrix-algebras $S_n$, with connecting morphisms

$S_n = M_{F_n}(\mathbb{C}) \oplus M_{F_{n-1}}(\mathbb{C}) \rightarrow S_{n+1} = M_{F_{n+1}}(\mathbb{C}) \oplus M_{F_n}(\mathbb{C}) \qquad (a,b) \mapsto ( \begin{matrix} a & 0 \\ 0 & b \end{matrix}, a)$

As such $Fib$ is an AF-algebra (for approximately finite) and hence formally smooth. That is, $Fib$ would be the coordinate ring of a smooth variety in the noncommutative sense, if only $Fib$ were finitely generated. However, $Fib$ is far from finitely generated and has other undesirable properties (at least for a noncommutative algebraic geometer) such as being simple and hence in particular $Fib$ has no finite dimensional representations…

A couple of weeks ago, Paul Smith discovered a surprising connection between the noncommutative space of Penrose tilings and an affine algebra in the paper The space of Penrose tilings and the non-commutative curve with homogeneous coordinate ring $\mathbb{C} \langle x,y \rangle/(y^2)$.

Giving $x$ and $y$ degree 1, the algebra $P = \mathbb{C} \langle x,y \rangle/(y^2)$ is obviously graded and noncommutative projective algebraic geometers like to associate to such algebras their ‘proj’ which is the quotient category of the category of all graded modules in which two objects become isomorphisc iff their ‘tails’ (that is forgetting the first few homogeneous components) are isomorphic.

The first type of objects NAGers try to describe are the point modules, which correspond to graded modules in which every homogeneous component is 1-dimensional, that is, they are of the form

$\mathbb{C} e_0 \oplus \mathbb{C} e_1 \oplus \mathbb{C} e_2 \oplus \cdots \oplus \mathbb{C} e_n \oplus \mathbb{C} e_{n+1} \oplus \cdots$

with $e_i$ an element of degree $i$. The reason for this is that point-modules correspond to the points of the (usual, commutative) projective variety when the affine graded algebra is commutative.

Now, assume that a Penrose tiling has been given by a sequence of 0’s and 1’s, say $(z_0,z_1,z_2,\cdots)$, then it is easy to associate to it a graded vectorspace with action given by

$x.e_i = e_{i+1}$ and $y.e_i = z_i e_{i+1}$

Because the sequence has no two consecutive ones, it is clear that this defines a graded module for the algebra $P$ and determines a point module in $\pmb{proj}(P)$. By the equivalence relation on Penrose sequences and the tails-equivalence on graded modules it follows that two sequences define the same Penrose tiling if and only if they determine the same point module in $\pmb{proj}(P)$. Phrased differently, the noncommutative space of Penrose tilings embeds in $\pmb{proj}(P)$ as a subset of the point-modules for $P$.

The only such point-module invariant under the shift-functor is the one corresponding to the 0-sequence, that is, corresponds to the cartwheel tiling

Another nice consequence is that we can now explain the local isomorphism property of Penrose tilings geometrically as a consequence of the fact that the $Ext^1$ between any two such point-modules is non-zero, that is, these noncommutative points lie ‘infinitely close’ to each other.

This is the easy part of Paul’s paper.

The truly, truly amazing part is that he is able to recover Connes’ AF-algebra $Fib$ from $\pmb{proj}(P)$ as the algebra of global sections! More precisely, he proves that there is an equivalence of categories between $\pmb{proj}(P)$ and the category of all $Fib$-modules $\pmb{mod}(Fib)$!

In other words, the noncommutative projective scheme $\pmb{proj}(P)$ is actually isomorphic to an affine scheme and as its coordinate ring is formally smooth $\pmb{proj}(P)$ is a noncommutative smooth variety. It would be interesting to construct more such examples of interesting AF-algebras appearing as local rings of sections of proj-es of affine graded algebras.

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Noncommutative algebra and geometry master-degree

Published January 26, 2011 by lievenlb

The lecturers, topics and dates of the 6 mini-courses in our ‘advanced master degree 2011 in noncommutative algebra and geometry’ are :

February 21-25
Vladimir Bavula (University of Sheffield) :
Localization Theory of Rings and Modules

March 7-11
Hans-Jürgen Schneider (University of München) :
Nichols Algebra and Root Systems

April 11-12
Bernhard Keller (Université Paris VII):
Cluster Algebra and Quantum Cluster Algebras

April 18-22
Jacques Alev (Université Reims):
Automorphisms of some Basic Algebras

May 3-8
Goro Kato (Cal Poly University, San Luis Obispo, US):
Sheaf Cohomology and Zeta – Functions

May 9-13
Markus Reineke (University of Wuppertal):
Moduli Spaces of Representatives

More information can be found here. I’ve been told that some limited support is available for foreign graduate students wanting to attend this programme.

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