## Lie’s Theorem IIJuly 27, 2009

Posted by Akhil Mathew in algebra, representation theory.
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Yesterday I was talking about Lie’s theorem for solvable Lie algebras. I went through most of the proof, but didn’t finish the last step. We had a solvable Lie algebra ${L}$ and an ideal ${I \subset L}$ such that ${I}$ was of codimension one.

There was a finite-dimensional representation ${V}$ of ${L}$. For ${\lambda \in I^*}$, we set

$\displaystyle V_\lambda := \{ v \in V: Yv = \lambda(Y) v, \ \mathrm{all} \ Y \in I \}.$

We assumed ${V_\lambda \neq 0}$ for some ${\lambda}$ by the induction hypothesis. Then the following then completes the proof of Lie’s theorem, by the “fundamental calculation:”

Lemma 1 If ${V_\lambda \neq 0}$, then ${\lambda([L,I])=0}$.

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## Lie’s Theorem IJuly 26, 2009

Posted by Akhil Mathew in algebra, representation theory.
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In the future, fix a Lie algebra ${L}$ over an algebraically closed field ${k}$ of characteristic zero.
Definition 1 The derived series of ${L}$ is the descending filtration ${D_n}$ defined by ${D_0 := L, D_n := [D_{n-1}, D_{n-1}]}$. The Lie algebra ${L}$ is solvable if ${D_M=0}$ for some ${M}$.
For instance, a nilpotent Lie algebra is solvable, since if ${\{C_n\}}$ is the lower central series, then ${D_n \subset C_n}$ for each ${n}$.