mathtools
Friday 9 September 2011
Monday 5 September 2011
Review: the Manga Guide to relativity
I have a confession to make. I have never liked physics a lot. As a sub degree at Stanford, I had to take a number of fundamental physics classes. Much of what we had to do was to use formulas to calculate the masses of tiny objects or to calculate small forces. The way it was taught in physics frustrated me because I developed no grounding of the topic. I could be off by many orders of magnitude and do not have a clue. Was the mass of that little thing 10 ^-20 grams or 10 ^-30 gram? Beats me. My Math education was on the other hand, much better, especially before my college years. I developed an intuitive ability to manipulate symbols and working with abstract concepts, which I never developed in physics.
When nice and remote control functionality IT no starch press offered me a review copy of The Manga Guide to relativity (Manga Guide series) I was reluctant to accept it. I will not review books not I even though I am certainly willing to report problems with the books I like in General.
I Manga Books. I have gone through in the Manga Guide to Calculus and the Manga Guide to statistics. I love the idea of transforming the difficult and detailed ideas for a story. I recently peer Keith Devlins new book, mathematics education to a new era: video games as a Medium for learning. In this book I learned the importance of creating an environment that engages students in learning. Video Games, if they are designed with the correct principles, do so in connection with computers. Manga Books, creating in my judgment, an excellent space for learning on the printed page.
So, what I think of this book? It is lighter on mathematical than I expect. It is heavily on introducing ideas. The story is entertaining. Michael Larsen has a great review on Amazon. Here is his introduction to the plot:
The most recent title, "The Manga Guide to relativity theory" (written by Hideo Nitta, Masafumi Yamamoto, Keita Takatsu) uses the classic history of the techniques common to most fans of the manga; student body President Ruka Minagi takes on a challenge from Rage Iyaga, sadistic and Moody school Rector (who also has a predilection towards androgyny, but hey, for someone with more than a passing security plans Manga titles, this pair of course) to write a report about relativity, thus sparing the rest of the class from having to do it over the summer break. If he succeeds, then the rest of the class spared the assignment. If he fails, he accepts the Iyaga's "personal assistant" for the next school year. All is not lost, although as a physics teacher Alisa Uraga agrees to teach Minagi about relativity, so he can complete the challenge. With, begins an adventure.
Most of the small number of reviewers on Amazon gave the book 5 stars. I love the book introduces a large number of concepts in a relaxed way. As another Amazon reviewer John Jacobson, noticed that makes paper relativity a number of important scientific ideas accessible to the non-mathematician. Jacobson's list includes:
the expression "relativity" idea of frames of reference, the difference between General and special relativity (it took Einstein 10 years to investigate and explain the general theory of relativity, after he had released his original paper on special relativity) space-time continuum speed limit universe (light speed) strange physical effects on the body when its speed approaching light (length contraction, time dilation hastighedstigende mass) derivation of the most famous equation of all time, the relationship between energy and mass ratio between gravity and acceleration Einstein's geometric view of space-time black hole gravity and the GPS systemWhile the ideas, there may be more available in comic form, they are still not simple ideas, and I certainly can't say that I now understand relativity. But now I am willing to consider that perhaps one day I physics, especially if I stick with the conceptual stuff for a good long time to get my bearings.
I very much look forward to the next Manga book.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Thursday 1 September 2011
Mini-polymath date and time 3
Following the results from this blog was polling, project mini polymath3 (which will focus on one of the problems from IMO 2011) will start on July 19 8 am UTC, and run simultaneously on this blog on wiki, blog polymath polymath.
Monday 29 August 2011
Find me on LinkedIn
I will make a big change in my life, my work is aligned with my deep love for Math. Part of the change is about to have richer relationships with other people who love Math. If you and I have done a nice connection through this blog, and if you are a person, Math, especially someone who is working to popularize Math, I would love to be associated with you on LinkedIn. Just click this link and requesting that I add you to my network. You can use email sol dot lederman at gmail dot com. I find LinkedIn to be a great way to connect with people, even when they move or change jobs, so it is a great way to make connections and keep them.
Oh, and I am not closing this blog.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Thursday 25 August 2011
C ^ {1,1} formula Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff
The formatter threw an exception while trying to deserialize the message: Error in deserializing body of request message for operation 'Translate'. The maximum string content length quota (30720) has been exceeded while reading XML data. This quota may be increased by changing the MaxStringContentLength property on the XmlDictionaryReaderQuotas object used when creating the XML reader. Line 1, position 33886.
Let be a Lie group with Lie algebra . As is well known, the exponential map is a local homeomorphism near the identity. As such, the group law on can be locally pulled back to an operation defined on a neighbourhood of the identity in , defined as
where is the local inverse of the exponential map. One can view as the group law expressed in local exponential coordinates around the origin.
An asymptotic expansion for is provided by the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff (BCH) formula
for all sufficiently small , where is the Lie bracket. More explicitly, one has the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff-Dynkin formula
for all sufficiently small , where , is the adjoint representation , and is the function
which is real analytic near and can thus be applied to linear operators sufficiently close to the identity. One corollary of this is that the multiplication operation is real analytic in local coordinates, and so every smooth Lie group is in fact a real analytic Lie group.
It turns out that one does not need the full force of the smoothness hypothesis to obtain these conclusions. It is, for instance, a classical result that regularity of the group operations is already enough to obtain the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula. Actually, it turns out that we can weaken this a bit, and show that even regularity (i.e. that the group operations are continuously differentiable, and the derivatives are locally Lipschitz) is enough to make the classical derivation of the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula work. More precisely, we have
Theorem 1 ( Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula) Let be a finite-dimensional vector space, and suppose one has a continuous operation defined on a neighbourhood around the origin, which obeys the following three axioms:
Then is real analytic (and in particular, smooth) near the origin. (In particular, gives a neighbourhood of the origin the structure of a local Lie group.)
Indeed, we will recover the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff-Dynkin formula (after defining appropriately) in this setting; see below the fold.
The reason that we call this a Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula is that if the group operation has regularity, and has as an identity element, then Taylor expansion already gives (2), and in exponential coordinates (which, as it turns out, can be defined without much difficulty in the category) one automatically has (3).
We will record the proof of Theorem 1 below the fold; it largely follows the classical derivation of the BCH formula, but due to the low regularity one will rely on tools such as telescoping series and Riemann sums rather than on the fundamental theorem of calculus. As an application of this theorem, we can give an alternate derivation of one of the components of the solution to Hilbert’s fifth problem, namely the construction of a Lie group structure from a Gleason metric, which was covered in the previous post; we discuss this at the end of this article. With this approach, one can avoid any appeal to von Neumann’s theorem and Cartan’s theorem (discussed in this post), or the Kuranishi-Gleason extension theorem (discussed in this post).
— 1. Proof of Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula —We begin with some simple bounds of Lipschitz and type on the group law .
Lemma 2 (Lipschitz bounds) If are sufficiently close to the origin, then
and
and
and similarly
Proof: We begin with the first estimate. If , then is small, and (on multiplying by ) we have . By (2) we have
and thus
As is small, we may invert the factor to obtain (4). The proof of (5) is similar.
Now we prove (6). Write . From (4) or (5) we have . Since , we have , so by (2) , and the claim follows. The proof of (7) is similar.
Lemma 3 (Adjoint representation) For all sufficiently close to the origin, there exists a linear transformation such that for all sufficiently close to the origin.
Proof: Fix . The map is continuous near the origin, so it will suffice to establish additivity, in the sense that
for sufficiently close to the origin.
Let be a large natural number. Then from (3) we have
where is the product of copies of . Conjugating this by , we see that
But from (2) we have
and thus (by Lemma 2)
But if we split as the product of and and use (2), we have
Putting all this together we see that
sending we obtain the claim.
From (2) we see that
for sufficiently small. Also from the associativity property we see that
for all sufficiently small. Combining these two properties (and using (4)) we conclude in particular that
for sufficiently small. Thus we see that is a continuous linear representation. In particular, is a continuous homomorphism into a linear group, and so we have the Hadamard lemma
where is the linear transformation
From (8), (9), (2) we see that
for sufficiently small, and so by the product rule we have
Also we clearly have for small. Thus we see that is linear in , and so we have
for some bilinear form .
One can show that this bilinear form in fact defines a Lie bracket, but for now, all we need is that it is manifestly real analytic (since all bilinear forms are polynomial and thus analytic), thus and depend analytically on .
We now give an important approximation to in the case when is small:
Lemma 4 For sufficiently small, we have
where
Proof: If we write , then (by (2)) and
We will shortly establish the approximation
inverting
we obtain the claim.
It remains to verify (10). Let be a large natural number. We can expand the left-hand side of (10) as a telescoping series
Using (3), the first summand can be expanded as
From (4) one has , so by (6), (7) we can write the preceding expression as
which by definition of can be rewritten as
From (4) one has
while from (9) one has , hence from (2) we can rewrite (12) as
Inserting this back into (11), we can thus write the left-hand side of (10) as
Writing , and then letting , we conclude (from the convergence of the Riemann sum to the Riemann integral) that
and the claim follows.
We can then integrate this to obtain an exact formula for :
Corollary 5 (Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff-Dynkin formula) For sufficiently small, one has
The right-hand side is clearly real analytic in and , and Lemma 1 follows.
Proof: Let be a large natural number. We can express as the telescoping sum
From (3) followed by Lemma 4 and (8), one has
We conclude that
Sending , so that the Riemann sum converges to a Riemann integral, we obtain the claim.
— 2. Building a Lie group from a Gleason metric —Remark 1 It seems likely that one can relax the type condition (2) in the above arguments to the weaker conditions
and
where is bounded by for some function that goes to zero at zero, and similarly for , as the effect of this is to replace various errors with errors that still go to zero as . However, type regularity is what is provided to us by Gleason metrics, so this type of regularity suffices for applications related to Hilbert’s fifth problem.
We can now give a slightly alternate derivation of Theorem 7 from the previous post, which asserted that every locally compact group with a Gleason metric was isomorphic to a Lie group. As in those notes, one begins by constructing the space of one-parameter subgroups, demonstrating that it is isomorphic to a finite-dimensional vector space , constructing the exponential map , and then showing that this map is locally a homeomorphism. Thus we can identify a neighbourhood of the identity in with a neighbourhood of the origin in , thus giving a locally defined multiplication operation in . By construction, this map is continuous and associative, and obeys the homogeneity (3) by the definition of the exponential map. Now we verify the estimate (2). From Lemma 8 in the previous post, one can verify that the exponential map is bilipschitz near the origin, and the claim is now to show that
for sufficiently close to the identity in . By definition of , it suffices to show that
for all ; but this follows from Lemma 8 of the previous post (and the observation, from the escape property, that and ).
Applying Theorem 1, we now see that is smooth, and so the group operations are smooth near the origin. Also, for any , conjugation by is an (local) outer automorphism of a neighbourhood of the identity, hence also an automorphism of . Since linear maps are automatically smooth, we conclude that conjugation by is smooth near the origin in exponential coordinates. From this, we can transport the smooth structure from a neighbourhood of the origin to the rest of (using either left or right translations), and obtain a Lie group structure as required.