lieven le bruyn's blog
Posts tagged Quillen
what does the monster see?
Jul 16th
The Monster is the largest of the 26 sporadic simple groups and has order
808 017 424 794 512 875 886 459 904 961 710 757 005 754 368 000 000 000
= 2^46 3^20 5^9 7^6 11^2 13^3 17 19 23 29 31 41 47 59 71.
It is not so much the size of its order that makes it hard to do actual calculations in the monster, but rather the dimensions of its smallest non-trivial irreducible representations (196 883 for the smallest, 21 296 876 for the next one, and so on).
In characteristic two there is an irreducible representation of one dimension less (196 882) which appears to be of great use to obtain information. For example, Robert Wilson used it to prove that The Monster is a Hurwitz group. This means that the Monster is generated by two elements g and h satisfying the relations

Geometrically, this implies that the Monster is the automorphism group of a Riemann surface of genus g satisfying the Hurwitz bound 84(g-1)=#Monster. That is,
g=9619255057077534236743570297163223297687552000000001=42151199 * 293998543 * 776222682603828537142813968452830193
Or, in analogy with the Klein quartic which can be constructed from 24 heptagons in the tiling of the hyperbolic plane, there is a finite region of the hyperbolic plane, tiled with heptagons, from which we can construct this monster curve by gluing the boundary is a specific way so that we get a Riemann surface with exactly 9619255057077534236743570297163223297687552000000001 holes. This finite part of the hyperbolic tiling (consisting of #Monster/7 heptagons) we’ll call the empire of the monster and we’d love to describe it in more detail.
Look at the half-edges of all the heptagons in the empire (the picture above learns that every edge in cut in two by a blue geodesic). They are exactly #Monster such half-edges and they form a dessin d’enfant for the monster-curve.
If we label these half-edges by the elements of the Monster, then multiplication by g in the monster interchanges the two half-edges making up a heptagonal edge in the empire and multiplication by h in the monster takes a half-edge to the one encountered first by going counter-clockwise in the vertex of the heptagonal tiling. Because g and h generated the Monster, the dessin of the empire is just a concrete realization of the monster.
Because g is of order two and h is of order three, the two permutations they determine on the dessin, gives a group epimorphism
from the modular group
onto the Monster-group.
In noncommutative geometry, the group-algebra of the modular group
can be interpreted as the coordinate ring of a noncommutative manifold (because it is formally smooth in the sense of Kontsevich-Rosenberg or Cuntz-Quillen) and the group-algebra of the Monster
itself corresponds in this picture to a finite collection of ‘points’ on the manifold. Using this geometric viewpoint we can now ask the question What does the Monster see of the modular group?
To make sense of this question, let us first consider the commutative equivalent : what does a point P see of a commutative variety X?
Evaluation of polynomial functions in P gives us an algebra epimorphism
from the coordinate ring of the variety
onto
and the kernel of this map is the maximal ideal
of
consisting of all functions vanishing in P.
Equivalently, we can view the point
as the scheme corresponding to the quotient
. Call this the 0-th formal neighborhood of the point P.
This sounds pretty useless, but let us now consider higher-order formal neighborhoods. Call the affine scheme
the n-th forml neighborhood of P, then the first neighborhood, that is with coordinate ring
gives us tangent-information. Alternatively, it gives the best linear approximation of functions near P.
The second neighborhood
gives us the best quadratic approximation of function near P, etc. etc.
These successive quotients by powers of the maximal ideal
form a system of algebra epimorphisms
![\hdots \frac{\mathbb{C}[X]}{\mathfrak{m}_P^{n+1}} \rightarrow \frac{\mathbb{C}[X]}{\mathfrak{m}_P^{n}} \rightarrow \hdots \hdots \rightarrow \frac{\mathbb{C}[X]}{\mathfrak{m}_P^{2}} \rightarrow \frac{\mathbb{C}[X]}{\mathfrak{m}_P} = \mathbb{C} \hdots \frac{\mathbb{C}[X]}{\mathfrak{m}_P^{n+1}} \rightarrow \frac{\mathbb{C}[X]}{\mathfrak{m}_P^{n}} \rightarrow \hdots \hdots \rightarrow \frac{\mathbb{C}[X]}{\mathfrak{m}_P^{2}} \rightarrow \frac{\mathbb{C}[X]}{\mathfrak{m}_P} = \mathbb{C}](/latexrender/pictures/5199d43b19162aa2866b764448eb9007.gif)
and its inverse limit
is the completion of the local ring in P and contains all the infinitesimal information (to any order) of the variety X in a neighborhood of P. That is, this completion
contains all information that P can see of the variety X.
In case P is a smooth point of X, then X is a manifold in a neighborhood of P and then this completion
is isomorphic to the algebra of formal power series
where the
form a local system of coordinates for the manifold X near P.
Right, after this lengthy recollection, back to our question what does the monster see of the modular group? Well, we have an algebra epimorphism

and in analogy with the commutative case, all information the Monster can gain from the modular group is contained in the
-adic completion

where
is the kernel of the epimorphism
sending the two free generators of the modular group
to the permutations g and h determined by the dessin of the pentagonal tiling of the Monster’s empire.
As it is a hopeless task to determine the Monster-empire explicitly, it seems even more hopeless to determine the kernel
let alone the completed algebra… But, (surprise) we can compute
as explicitly as in the commutative case we have
for a point P on a manifold X.
Here the details : the quotient
has a natural structure of
-bimodule. The group-algebra of the monster is a semi-simple algebra, that is, a direct sum of full matrix-algebras of sizes corresponding to the dimensions of the irreducible monster-representations. That is,

with exactly 194 components (the number of irreducible Monster-representations). For any
-bimodule
one can form the tensor-algebra

and applying the formal neighborhood theorem for formally smooth algebras (such as
) due to Joachim Cuntz (left) and Daniel Quillen (right) we have an isomorphism of algebras

where the right-hand side is the completion of the tensor-algebra (at the unique graded maximal ideal) of the
-bimodule
, so we’d better describe this bimodule explicitly.
Okay, so what’s a bimodule over a semisimple algebra of the form
? Well, a simple S-bimodule must be either (1) a factor
with all other factors acting trivially or (2) the full space of rectangular matrices
with the factor
acting on the left,
acting on the right and all other factors acting trivially.
That is, any S-bimodule can be represented by a quiver (that is a directed graph) on k vertices (the number of matrix components) with a loop in vertex i corresponding to each simple factor of type (1) and a directed arrow from i to j corresponding to every simple factor of type (2).
That is, for the Monster, the bimodule
is represented by a quiver on 194 vertices and now we only have to determine how many loops and arrows there are at or between vertices.
Using Morita equivalences and standard representation theory of quivers it isn’t exactly rocket science to determine that the number of arrows between the vertices corresponding to the irreducible Monster-representations
and
is equal to

Now, I’ve been wasting a lot of time already here explaining what representations of the modular group have to do with quivers (see for example here or some other posts in the same series) and for quiver-representations we all know how to compute Ext-dimensions in terms of the Euler-form applied to the dimension vectors.
Right, so for every Monster-irreducible
we have to determine the corresponding dimension-vector
for the quiver
![\xymatrix{ & & & &
\vtx{b_1} \\ \vtx{a_1} \ar[rrrru]^(.3){B_{11}} \ar[rrrrd]^(.3){B_{21}}
\ar[rrrrddd]_(.2){B_{31}} & & & & \\ & & & & \vtx{b_2} \\ \vtx{a_2}
\ar[rrrruuu]_(.7){B_{12}} \ar[rrrru]_(.7){B_{22}}
\ar[rrrrd]_(.7){B_{23}} & & & & \\ & & & & \vtx{b_3}} \xymatrix{ & & & &
\vtx{b_1} \\ \vtx{a_1} \ar[rrrru]^(.3){B_{11}} \ar[rrrrd]^(.3){B_{21}}
\ar[rrrrddd]_(.2){B_{31}} & & & & \\ & & & & \vtx{b_2} \\ \vtx{a_2}
\ar[rrrruuu]_(.7){B_{12}} \ar[rrrru]_(.7){B_{22}}
\ar[rrrrd]_(.7){B_{23}} & & & & \\ & & & & \vtx{b_3}}](/latexrender/pictures/1ca7d900d808eeda597faa97a6cf069f.gif)
Now the dimensions
are the dimensions of the +/-1 eigenspaces for the order 2 element g in the representation and the
are the dimensions of the eigenspaces for the order 3 element h. So, we have to determine to which conjugacy classes g and h belong, and from Wilson’s paper mentioned above these are classes 2B and 3B in standard Atlas notation.
So, for each of the 194 irreducible Monster-representations we look up the character values at 2B and 3B (see below for the first batch of those) and these together with the dimensions determine the dimension vector
.

For example take the 196883-dimensional irreducible. Its 2B-character is 275 and the 3B-character is 53. So we are looking for a dimension vector such that
and
giving us for that representation the dimension vector of the quiver above
.
Okay, so for each of the 194 irreducibles
we have determined a dimension vector
, then standard quiver-representation theory asserts that the number of loops in the vertex corresponding to
is equal to

and that the number of arrows from vertex
to vertex
is equal to

This data then determines completely the
-bimodule
and hence the structure of the completion
containing all information the Monster can gain from the modular group.
But then, one doesn’t have to go for the full regular representation of the Monster. Any faithful permutation representation will do, so we might as well go for the one of minimal dimension.
That one is known to correspond to the largest maximal subgroup of the Monster which is known to be a two-fold extension
of the Baby-Monster. The corresponding permutation representation is of dimension 97239461142009186000 and decomposes into Monster-irreducibles

(in standard Atlas-ordering) and hence repeating the arguments above we get a quiver on just 9 vertices! The actual numbers of loops and arrows (I forgot to mention this, but the quivers obtained are actually symmetric) obtained were found after laborious computations mentioned in this post and the details I’ll make avalable here.
Anyone who can spot a relation between the numbers obtained and any other part of mathematics will obtain quantities of genuine (ie. non-Inbev) Belgian beer…
“God given time”
Feb 20th
Noncommutative geometry and the Riemann zeta function
If you ever sat through a lecture by Alain Connes you will know about his insistence on the ‘canonical dynamic nature of noncommutative manifolds’. If you haven’t, he did write a blog post Heart bit 1 about it.
I’ll try to explain here that there is a definite “supplément d’âme” obtained in the transition from classical (commutative) spaces to the noncommutative ones. The main new feature is that “noncommutative spaces generate their own time” and moreover can undergo thermodynamical operations such as cooling, distillation etc…
Here a section from his paper A view of mathematics :
Indeed even at the coarsest level of understanding of a space provided by measure theory, which in essence only cares about the “quantity of points” in a space, one finds unexpected completely new features in the noncommutative case. While it had been long known by operator algebraists that the theory of von-Neumann algebras represents a far reaching extension of measure theory, the main surprise which occurred at the beginning of the seventies is that such an algebra M inherits from its noncommutativity a god-given time evolution:where
is the quotient of the group of automorphisms of M by the normal subgroup of inner automorphisms. This led in my thesis to the reduction from type III to type II and their automorphisms and eventually to the classification of injective factors.
Even a commutative manifold has a kind of dynamics associated to it. Take a suitable vectorfield, consider the flow determined by it and there’s your ‘dynamics’, or a one-parameter group of automorphisms on the functions. Further, other classes of noncommutative algebras have similar features. For example, Cuntz and Quillen showed that also formally smooth algebras (the noncommutative manifolds in the algebraic world) have natural Yang-Mills flows associated to them, giving a one-parameter subgroup of automorphisms.
Let us try to keep far from mysticism and let us agree that by ‘time’ (let alone ‘god given time’) we mean a one-parameter subgroup of algebra automorphisms of the noncommutative algebra. In nice cases, such as some von-Neumann algebras this canonical subgroup is canonical in the sense that it is unique upto inner automorphisms.
In the special case of the Bost-Connes algebra these automorphisms
are given by
and
.
This one-parameter subgroup is crucial in the definition of the so called KMS-states (for Kubo-Martin and Schwinger) which is our next goal.
Segal’s formal neighbourhood result
Dec 8th
Yesterday, Ed Segal gave a talk at the Arts. His title “Superpotential algebras from 3-fold singularities” didnt look too promising to me. And sure enough it was all there again : stringtheory, D-branes, Calabi-Yaus, superpotentials, all the pseudo-physics babble that spreads virally among the youngest generation of algebraists and geometers.
Fortunately, his talk did contain a general ringtheoretic gem. After a bit of polishing up this gem, contained in his paper The A-infinity Deformation Theory of a Point and the Derived Categories of Local Calabi-Yaus, can be stated as follows.
Let
be a
-algebra and let
be a finite dimensional semi-simple representation with distinct simple components. Let
be the kernel of the algebra epimorphism
to the semi-simple algebra
. Then, the
-adic completion of
is Morita-equivalent to the completion of a quiver-algebra with relations. The nice thing is that both the quiver and relations come in a canonical way from the
-structure on the Ext-algebra
. More precisely, there is an isomorphism

where the homotopy Maurer-Cartan map comes from the
structure maps

and hence the defining relations of the completion are given by the image of the dual of this map.
For ages, Ive known this result in the trivial case of formally smooth algebras (where
and hence there are no relations to divide out) and where it is a consequence of a special case of the Cuntz-Quillen “tubular neighborhood” result. Completions of formally smooth algebras at semi-simples are Morita equivalent to completions of path algebras. This fact motivated all the local-quiver technology that was developed here in Antwerp over the last decade (see my book if you want to know the details).
Also for 3-dimensional Calabi-Yau algebras it states that the completions at semi-simples are Morita equivalent to completions of quotients of path algebras by the relations coming from a superpotential (aka a necklace) by taking partial noncommutative derivatives. Here the essential ingredient is that
in this case.
time for selfcriticism
Feb 22nd
The problem with criticizing others is that you have to apply the same standards to your own work. So, as of this afternoon, I do agree with all those who said so before : my book is completely unreadable and should either be dumped or entirely rewritten!
Here’s what happened : Last week I did receive the contract to publish noncommutative geometry@n in a reputable series. One tiny point though, the editors felt that the title was somewhat awkward and would stand out with respect to the other books in the series, so they proposed as an alternative title Noncommutative Geometry. A tall order, I thought, but then, if others are publishing books with such a title why shouldn’t I do the same?
The later chapters are quite general, anyway, and if I would just spice them up a little adding recent material it might even improve the book. So, rewriting two chapters and perhaps adding another “motivational chapter” aimed at physicists… should be doable in a month, or two at the latest which would fit in nicely with the date the final manuscript is due.
This week, I got myself once
again in writing mode : painfully drafting new sections at a pace of 5
to 6 pages a day. Everything was going well. Today I wanted to finish
the section on the “one quiver to rule them all”-trick and was
already mentally planning the next section in which I would give details
for groups like
and
, all I
needed was to type in a version of the proof of the last proposition.
The proof uses a standard argument, which clearly should be in the book so I had to give the correct reference and started browsing through the print-out of the latest version (about 600 pages long..) but… I could not find it!??? And, it was not just some minor technical lemma, but a result which is crucial to the book’s message (for the few who want to know, the result is the construction and properties of the local quiver at a semi-simple representation of a Quillen-smooth algebra). Of course, there is a much more general result contained in the book, but you have to be me (or have to be drilled by me) to see the connection… Not good at all! I’d better sleep on this before taking further steps
coalgebras and non-geometry 2
Sep 7th
Last time we
have seen that the coalgebra of distributions of an affine smooth
variety is the direct sum (over all points) of the dual to the etale
local algebras which are all of the form
where
is the dimension of the
variety. Generalizing this to non-commutative manifolds, the first
questions are : “What is the analogon of the power-series algebra?” and
do all ‘points’ of our non-commutative manifold do have such local
algebras? Surely, we no longer expect the variables to commute, so a
non-commutative version of the power series algebra should be
,
the ring of formal power series in non-commuting variables. However,
there is still another way to add non-commutativity and that is to go
from an algebra to matrices over the algebra. So, in all we would expect
to be our local algebras at points of our non-commutative manifold to
be isomorphic to
As to the second question : _qurves (that is,
the coordinate rings of non-commutative manifolds) do have such algebras
as local rings provided we take as the ‘points’ of the non-commutative
variety the set of all simple finite dimensional representations of
the qurve. This is a consequence of the tubular neighborhood theorem
due to Cuntz and
Quillen. In more details : If A is a qurve, then a simple
-dimensional representation corresponds to an epimorphism
and if we take
, then
is an
-bimodule and
the
-adic completion of A is isomorphic to the
completed tensor-algebra
In contrast with
the commutative case however where the dimension remains constant over
all points, here the numbers n and d can change from simple to simple.
For n this is clear as it gives the dimension of the simple
representation, but also d changes (it is the local dimension of the
variety classifying simple representations of the same dimension). Here
an easy example : Consider the skew group algebra
with the action given by sending
. Then A is a qurve and its center is
with
. Over any point
there is a unique simple 2-dimensional representation of A
giving the local algebra
. If
the situation is more complicated as the local structure
of A is given by the algebra
So, over
this point there are precisely 2 one-dimensional simple representations
corresponding to the maximal ideals
and
both ideals are idempotent, that is
whence the corresponding bimodule
so the local algebra in either of these two points is just
. Ok, so the comleted local algebra at each point
is of the form
, but what is the corresponding dual coalgebra. Well,
is
the algebra dual to the _cofree coalgebra on
. As a vectorspace this is the
tensor-algebra
with the coalgebra structure induced by the bialgebra
structure defined by taking all varaibales to be primitives, that is
. That is, the
coproduct on a monomial gives all different expressions
such that
. For example,
. On the other hand, the dual coalgebra of
is the matrix coalgebra which is the
-dimensional vectorspace
with comultiplication
The coalgebra corresponding to the
local algebra
is then the tensor-coalgebra of the matrix coalgebra and
the cofree coalgebra. Having obtained the coalgebra at each point
(=simple representation) of our noncommutative manifold one might think
that the _coalgebra of non-commutative distributions should be the
direct sum of all this coalgebras, summed over all points, as in the
commutative case. But then we would forget about a major difference
between the commutative and the non-commutative world : distinct simples
can have non-trivial extensions! The mental picture one might have
about simples having non-trivial extensions is that these points lie
‘infinitesimally close’ together. In the
example above, the two one-dimensional simples have
non-trivial extensions so they should be thought of as a cluster of two
infinitesimally close points corresponding to the point
(that is, this commutative points splits into two non-commutative
points). Btw. this is the reason why non-commutative algebras can be
used to resolve commutative singularities (excessive tangents can be
split over several non-commutative points). While this is still pretty
harmless when the algebra is finite over its center (as in the above
example where only the two one-dimensionals have extensions), the
situation becomes weird over general qurves as ‘usually’ distinct
simples have non-trivial extensions. For example, for the free algebra
this is true for all simples…
So, if we want to continue using this image of points lying closely
together this immediately means that non-commutative ‘affine’ manifolds
behave like compact ones (in fact, it turns out to be pretty difficult
to ‘glue’ together qurves into ‘bigger’ non-commutative manifolds, apart
from the quiver examples of this old
paper). So, how to bring
this new information into our coalgebra of distributions? Well, let’s
repeat the previous argument not with just one point but with a set of
finitely many points. Then we have a _semi-simple algebra quotient
and taking again
and
, then
is again an
S-bimodule. Now, any S-bimodule can be encoded into a quiver Q on k
points, the number of arrows from vertex i to vertex j being the number
of components in M of the form
. Again, it follows from the tubular neighborhood
theorem that the
-adic completion of A is
isomorphic to the completion of an algebra Morita equivalent to the
_path algebra
(being the tensor algebra
). As all the local algebras of the points are
quotients of this quiver-like completion, on the coalgebra level our
local coalgebras will be sub coalgebras of the coalgebra which is
co-Morita equivalent (and believe it or not but coalgebraists have a
name for this : _Takeuchi equivalence) to the quiver coalgebra which
is the vectorspace of the path algebra
with
multiplication induced by making all arrows from i to j skew-primitives,
that is,
where the
are group-likes corresponding to the vertices. If all of
ths is a bit too much co to take in at once, I suggest the paper by Bill
Chin A brief introduction to coalgebra representation
theory. The
_coalgebra of noncommutative distributions we are after at is now the
union of all these Takeuchi-equivalent quiver coalgebras. In easy
examples such as the
-example this
coalgebra is still pretty small (the sum of the local coalgebras
corresponding to the local algebras
summed over all points
summed with the quiver
coalgebra of the quiver
In general though this is a huge object and we would
like to have a recipe to construct it from a manageable blue-print and
that is what we will do next time.
where
is the quotient of the group of automorphisms of M
by the normal subgroup of inner automorphisms. This led in my thesis to the
reduction from type III to type II and their automorphisms and eventually to the
classification of injective factors.







