What is … a Quantum Group?

This page hosts information on Inna Lukyanenko's talk "What is … a Quantum Group?" at the "What is …?" seminar. The talk will take place on Friday, November 27, 5pm at the BMS Lounge at TU MA 212. This talk will be followed by a movie with pizza and drinks.

Abstract

The term "Quantum Group" is due to V. Drinfeld and it refers to special Hopf algebras, which are the non-trivial deformations ("quantizations") of the enveloping Hopf algebras of semisimple Lie algebras or of the algebras of regular functions on the corresponding algebraic groups. These objects first appeared in physics, namely in the theory of quantum integrable systems, in the 1980's, and were later formalized independently by Vladimir Drinfeld and Michio Jimbo. In this talk I will explain the main idea of deformation and introduce the simplest and historically the first example of a Quantum Group: U_q(sl(2)).

Video

The video is available on vimeo.

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