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Sophus Lie and Felix Klein:
The Erlangen Program
and Its Impact in
Mathematics and Physics
Lizhen Ji
Athanase Papadopoulos
Editors
Editors:

Lizhen Ji Athanase Papadopoulos

Department of Mathematics Institut de Recherche Mathématique Avancée
University of Michigan CNRS et Université de Strasbourg
530 Church Street 7 Rue René Descartes
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1043 67084 Strasbourg Cedex
USA France

2010 Mathematics Subject Classification: 01-00, 01-02, 01A05, 01A55, 01A70, 22-00, 22-02, 22-03, 51N15,
51P05, 53A20, 53A35, 53B50, 54H15, 58E40

Key words: Sophus Lie, Felix Klein, the Erlangen program, group action, Lie group action, symmetry,
projective geometry, non-Euclidean geometry, spherical geometry, hyperbolic geometry, transitional
geometry, discrete geometry, transformation group, rigidity, Galois theory, symmetries of partial
differential equations, mathematical physics

ISBN 978-3-03719-148-4

The Swiss National Library lists this publication in The Swiss Book, the Swiss national bibliography, and the
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://www.helveticat.ch.

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is
concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting,
reproduction on microfilms or in other ways, and storage in data banks. For any kind of use permission of the
copyright owner must be obtained.

© 2015 European Mathematical Society

Contact address:

European Mathematical Society Publishing House

Seminar for Applied Mathematics
ETH-Zentrum SEW A27
CH-8092 Zürich
Switzerland

Phone: +41 (0)44 632 34 36

Email: [email protected]
Homepage: www.ems-ph.org

Typeset using the authors’ TEX files: le-tex publishing services GmbH, Leipzig, Germany
Printing and binding: Beltz Bad Langensalza GmbH, Bad Langensalza, Germany
∞ Printed on acid free paper
987654321
Preface

The Erlangen program provides a fundamental point of view on the place of trans-
formation groups in mathematics and physics. Felix Klein wrote the program, but
Sophus Lie also contributed to its formulation, and his writings are probably the best
example of how this program is used in mathematics. The present book gives the first
modern historical and comprehensive treatment of the scope, applications and impact
of the Erlangen program in geometry and physics and the roles played by Lie and
Klein in its formulation and development. The book is also intended as an introduc-
tion to the works and visions of these two mathematicians. It addresses the question
of what is geometry, how are its various facets connected with each other, and how
are geometry and group theory involved in physics. Besides Lie and Klein, the names
of Bernhard Riemann, Henri Poincaré, Hermann Weyl, Élie Cartan, Emmy Noether
and other major mathematicians appear at several places in this volume.
A conference was held at the University of Strasbourg in September 2012, as
the 90th meeting of the periodic Encounter between Mathematicians and Theoretical
Physicists, whose subject was the same as the title of this book. The book does
not faithfully reflect the talks given at the conference, which were generally more
specialized. Indeed, our plan was to have a book interesting for a wide audience and
we asked the potential authors to provide surveys and not technical reports.
We would like to thank Manfred Karbe for his encouragement and advice, and
Hubert Goenner and Catherine Meusburger for valuable comments. We also thank
Goenner, Meusburger and Arnfinn Laudal for sending photographs that we use in this
book.
This work was supported in part by the French program ANR Finsler, by the
GEAR network of the National Science Foundation (GEometric structures And Rep-
resentation varieties) and by a stay of the two editors at the Erwin Schrödinger Insti-
tute for Mathematical Physics (Vienna).

Lizhen Ji and Athanase Papadopoulos

Ann Arbor and Strasbourg, March 2015
Contents

Preface v

Introduction xi

1 Sophus Lie, a giant in mathematics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Lizhen Ji

2 Felix Klein: his life and mathematics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Lizhen Ji

3 Klein and the Erlangen Programme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

Jeremy J. Gray

4 Klein’s “Erlanger Programm”: do traces of it exist in physical theories? 77

Hubert Goenner

5 On Klein’s So-called Non-Euclidean geometry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

Norbert A’Campo, Athanase Papadopoulos

6 What are symmetries of PDEs and what are PDEs themselves? . . . . . 137
Alexandre Vinogradov

7 Transformation groups in non-Riemannian geometry . . . . . . . . . . 191

Charles Frances

8 Transitional geometry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

Norbert A’Campo, Athanase Papadopoulos

9 On the projective geometry of constant curvature spaces . . . . . . . . 237

Athanase Papadopoulos, Sumio Yamada

10 The Erlangen program and discrete differential geometry . . . . . . . . 247

Yuri B. Suris

11 Three-dimensional gravity – an application of Felix Klein’s ideas

in physics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
Catherine Meusburger

12 Invariances in physics and group theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307

Jean-Bernard Zuber
viii Contents

List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327
Sophus Lie.
Felix Klein.
Introduction

The Erlangen program is a perspective on geometry through invariants of the auto-

morphism group of a space. The original reference to this program is a paper by Felix
Klein which is usually presented as the exclusive historical document in this matter.
Even though Klein’s viewpoint was generally accepted by the mathematical commu-
nity, its re-interpretation in the light of modern geometries, and especially of modern
theories of physics, is central today. There are no books on the modern developments
of this program. Our book is one modest step towards this goal.
The history of the Erlangen program is intricate. Klein wrote this program, but
Sophus Lie made a very substantial contribution, in promoting and popularizing the
ideas it contains. The work of Lie on group actions and his emphasis on their impor-
tance were certainly more decisive than Klein’s contribution. This is why Lie’s name
comes first in the title of the present volume. Another major figure in this story is
Poincaré, and his role in highlighting the importance of group actions is also critical.
Thus, groups and group actions are at the center of our discussion. But their
importance in mathematics had already been crucial before the Erlangen program
was formulated.
From its early beginning in questions related to solutions of algebraic equations,
group theory is merged with geometry and topology. In fact, group actions existed
and were important before mathematicians gave them a name, even though the for-
malization of the notion of a group and its systematic use in the language of geometry
took place in the 19th century. If we consider group theory and transformation groups
as an abstraction of the notion of symmetry, then we can say that the presence and
importance of this notion in the sciences and in the arts was realized in ancient times.
Today, the notion of group is omnipresent in mathematics and, in fact, if we want
to name one single concept which runs through the broad field of mathematics, it
is the notion of group. Among groups, Lie groups play a central role. Besides
their mathematical beauty, Lie groups have many applications both inside and out-
side mathematics. They are a combination of algebra, geometry and topology.
Besides groups, our subject includes geometry.
Unlike the word “group” which, in mathematics has a definite significance, the
word “geometry” is not frozen. It has several meanings, and all of them (even the
most recent ones) can be encompassed by the modern interpretation of Klein’s idea.
In the first version of Klein’s Erlangen program, the main geometries that are em-
phasized are projective geometry and the three constant curvature geometries (Eu-
clidean, hyperbolic and spherical), which are considered there, like affine geometry,
as part of projective geometry. This is due to the fact that the transformation groups
of all these geometries can be viewed as restrictions to subgroups of the transfor-
mation group of projective geometry. After these first examples of group actions in
geometry, the stress shifted to Lie transformation groups, and it gradually included
many new notions, like Riemannian manifolds, and more generally spaces equipped
xii Introduction

with affine connections. There is a wealth of geometries which can be described by

transformation groups in the spirit of the Erlangen program. Several of these ge-
ometries were studied by Klein and Lie; among them we can mention Minkowski
geometry, complex geometry, contact geometry and symplectic geometry. In modern
geometry, besides the transformations of classical geometry which take the form of
motions, isometries, etc., new notions of transformations and maps between spaces
arose. Today, there is a wealth of new geometries that can be described by trans-
formation groups in the spirit of the Erlangen program, including modern algebraic
geometry where, according to Grothendieck’s approach, the notion of morphism is
more important than the notion of space.1 As a concrete example of this fact, one can
compare the Grothendieck–Riemann–Roch theorem with the Hirzebruch–Riemann–
Roch. The former, which concerns morphisms, is much stronger than the latter, which
concerns spaces.
Besides Lie and Klein, several other mathematicians must be mentioned in this
venture. Lie created Lie theory, but others’ contributions are also immense. About
two decades before Klein wrote his Erlangen program, Riemann had introduced new
geometries, namely, in his inaugural lecture, Über die Hypothesen, welche der Geo-
metrie zu Grunde liegen (On the hypotheses which lie at the bases of geometry)
(1854). These geometries, in which groups intervene at the level of infinitesimal
transformations, are encompassed by the program. Poincaré, all across his work,
highlighted the importance of groups. In his article on the Future of mathematics2, he
wrote: “Among the words that exerted the most beneficial influence, I will point out
the words group and invariant. They made us foresee the very essence of mathemat-
ical reasoning. They showed us that in numerous cases the ancient mathematicians
considered groups without knowing it, and how, after thinking that they were far away
from each other, they suddenly ended up close together without understanding why.”
Poincaré stressed several times the importance of the ideas of Lie in the theory of
group transformations. In his analysis of his own works,3 Poincaré declares: “Like
Lie, I believe that the notion, more or less unconscious, of a continuous group is the
unique logical basis of our geometry.” Killing, É. Cartan, Weyl, Chevalley and many
others refined the structures of Lie theory and they developed its global aspects and
applications to homogeneous spaces. The generalization of the Erlangen program
to these new spaces uses the notions of connections and gauge groups, which were

1 See A. Grothendieck, Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, 14–21 August 1958,
Edinburgh, ed. J.A. Todd, Cambridge University Press, p. 103–118. In that talk, Grothendieck sketched his
theory of cohomology of schemes.
2 H. Poincaré, L’Avenir des mathématiques, Revue générale des sciences pures et appliquées 19 (1908)

p. 930–939. [Parmi les mots qui ont exercé la plus heureuse influence, je signalerai ceux de groupe et d’invariant.
Ils nous ont fait apercevoir l’essence de bien des raisonnements mathématiques ; ils nous ont montré dans com-
bien de cas les anciens mathématiciens considéraient des groupes sans le savoir, et comment, se croyant bien
éloignés les uns des autres, ils se trouvaient tout à coup rapprochés sans comprendre pourquoi.]
3 Analyse de ses travaux scientifiques, par Henri Poincaré. Acta Mathematica, 38 (1921), p. 3–135. [Comme

Lie, je crois que la notion plus ou moins inconsciente de groupe continu est la seule base logique de notre
géométrie]; p. 127. There are many similar quotes in Poincaré’s works.
 Introduction xiii

closely linked to new developments in physics, in particular, in electromagnetism,

phenomena related to light, and Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
Today, instead of the word “geometry” we often use the expression “geometric
structure”, and there is a wealth of geometric structures which can be described by
transformation groups in the spirit of the Erlangen program. We mention in particular
the notion of .G; X / structure introduced by Charles Ehresmann in the 1930s, which
is of paramount importance. Here X is a homogeneous space and G a Lie group
acting transitively on G. A .G; X / structure on a manifold M is then an atlas whose
charts are in X and whose coordinate changes are restrictions of elements of G acting
on X . Ehresmann formulated the notions of developing map and of holonomy trans-
formations, which are basic objects in the study of these structures and their moduli
spaces. .G; X / structures have several variants and they have been developed and
adapted to various settings by Haefliger, Kuiper, Benzécri, Thurston, Goldman and
others to cover new structures, including foliations and singular spaces. The most
spectacular advancement in this domain is certainly Thurston’s vision of the eight ge-
ometries in dimension three, his formulation of the geometrization conjecture and the
work around it, which culminated in the proof of the Poincaré conjecture by Perel-
man.
We talked about mathematics, but the Erlangen program also encompasses physics.
In fact, geometry is closely related to physics, and symmetry is essential in modern
physics. Klein himself investigated the role of groups in physics, when he stressed
the concept of geometric invariants in his description of Einstein’s theories of special
and general relativity, in particular by showing the importance of the Lorentz group,
and also in his work on the conservation laws of energy and momentum in general
relativity. Another milestone that led to conceptual clarifications and made it possible
to systematically exploit the notion of symmetry in physics was E. Noether’s work
that related symmetries of physical systems to conserved quantities.
In conclusion, the central questions that are behind the present volume are:
 What is geometry?
 What is the relation between geometry and physics?
 How are groups used in physics, especially in contemporary physics?
Let us now describe briefly the content of this volume.
Chapters 1 and 2, written by Lizhen Ji, are introductions to the lives and works on
Lie and Klein. Even though Klein was a major mathematician, surprisingly enough,
there is no systematic English biography of him. The author’s aim is to fill this gap to
a certain extent. Besides providing convenient short biographies of Lie and Klein, the
author wishes to convince the reader of the importance of their works, especially those
which are in close relation with the Erlangen program, and also to show how close
the two men were in their ideas and characters. They both learned from each other
and they had a profound influence on each other. This closeness, their ambitiousness,
the competition among them and their disputes for priority of some discoveries were
altogether the reasons that made them split after years of collaboration and friend-
ship. The conflict between them is interesting and not so well known. The author
describes this conflict, also mentions the difficulties that these two men encountered
xiv Introduction

in their professional lives and in their relations with other mathematicians. Both of
them experienced nervous breakdowns.4 The chapter on Lie also contains an out-
line of his important theories as well as statements of some of his most significant
theorems. In particular, the author puts forward in modern language and comments
on three fundamental theorems of Lie. Concerning Klein, it is more difficult to pick
out individual theorems, because Klein is known for having transmitted ideas rather
than specific results. The author explains how Klein greatly influenced people and
the world around him through his lectures and conversations, his books, the journals
he edited, and he also recalls his crucial influence in shaping up the university of
Göttingen to be the world’s most important mathematics center. In these surveys, the
author also mentions several mathematicians who were closely related in some way
or another to Lie and Klein, among them Hilbert, Hausdorff, Engel, Plücker, Sylow,
Schwarz and Poincaré. The chapter on Lie also reviews other aspects of Lie’s work
besides Lie groups.
Chapter 3, by Jeremy Gray, is a historical commentary on the Erlangen program.
The author starts by a short summary of the program manifesto and on the circum-
stances of its writing, mentioning the influence of several mathematicians, and the
importance of the ideas that originate from projective geometry (specially those of
von Staudt). He then brings up the question of the impact of this program on the
views of several mathematicians, comparing the opinions of Birkhoff and Bennet and
of Hawkins.
In Chapter 4, Hubert Goenner presents a critical discussion of the general impact
and of the limitations of the Erlangen program in physics. He starts by recalling
that the influence of the Erlangen program in physics was greatly motivated by the
geometrization of special relativity by H. Minkowski, in which the Lorentz group
appears as one of the main objects of interest, but he stresses the fact that the no-
tion of field defined on a geometry – and not the notion of geometry itself – is then
the central element. He comments on the relation of Lie transformations with theo-
ries of conservation laws and the relations of the Erlangen program with symplectic
geometry, analytical mechanics, statistical physics, quantum field theories, general
relativity, Yang–Mills theory and supergravity. The paper has a special section where
the author discusses supersymmetry. In a final section, the author mentions several
generalizations of the notion of Lie algebra.
In Chapter 5, Norbert A’Campo and Athanase Papadopoulos comment on the two
famous papers of Klein, Über die sogenannte Nicht-Euklidische Geometrie (On the
so-called non-Euclidean geometries), I and II. The two papers were written respec-
tively one year and a few months before the Erlangen program, and they contain in
essence the main ideas of this program. We recall that the 19th century saw the birth
of non-Euclidean geometry by Lobachevsky, Bolyai and Gauss, and at the same time,
the development of projective geometry by Poncelet, Plücker, von Staudt and others,
and also of conformal geometry by Liouville and others. Groups made the first link
between all these geometries, and also between geometry and algebra. Klein, in the
4 Klein’s nervous breakdown was probably due to overwork and exhaustion, caused in part by his rude compe-

tition with Poincaré on Fuchsian functions, whereas Lie’s nervous breakdown was the consequence of a chronic
illness, pernicious anemia, related to a lack in vitamin B12, which at that time was incurable.
 Introduction xv

papers cited above, gives models of the three constant-curvature geometries (hyper-
bolic, Euclidean and spherical) in the setting of projective geometry. He defines the
distance functions in each of these geometries by fixing a conic (the “conic at infin-
ity”) and taking a constant multiple of the logarithm of the cross ratio of four points:
the given two points and the two intersection points of the line joining them with the
conic at infinity. The hyperbolic and spherical geometries are obtained by using real
and complex conics respectively, and Euclidean geometry by using a degenerate one.
The authors in Chapter 5 comment on these two important papers of Klein and they
display relations with works of other mathematicians, including Cayley, Beltrami,
Poincaré and the founders of projective geometry.
Klein’s interaction with Lie in their formative years partly motivated Lie to de-
velop Lie’s version of Galois theory of differential equations and hence of Lie trans-
formation theory.5 In fact, a major motivation for Lie for the introduction of Lie
groups was to understand differential equations. This subject is treated in Chapter 6
of this volume. The author, Alexandre Vinogradov, starts by observing that Lie initi-
ated his work by transporting the Galois theory of the solvability of algebraic equa-
tions to the setting of differential equations. He explains that the major contribution
of Lie in this setting is the idea that symmetries of differential equations are the basic
elements in the search for their solutions. One may recall here that Galois approached
the problem of solvability of polynomial equations through a study of the symmetries
of their roots. This is based on the simple observation that the coefficients of a poly-
nomial may be expressed in terms of the symmetric functions of their roots, and that
a permutation of the roots does not change the coefficients of the polynomial. In the
case of differential equations, one can naively define the symmetry group to be the
group of diffeomorphisms which preserve the space of solutions, but it is not clear
how such a notion can be used. There is a differential Galois theory which is parallel
to the Galois theory of polynomial equations. In the differential theory, the question
“what are the symmetries of a (linear or nonlinear, partial or ordinary) differential
equation?” is considered as the central question. Chapter 6 also contains reviews of
the notions of jets and jet spaces and other constructions to explain the right setup for
formulating the question of symmetry, with the goal of providing a uniform frame-
work for the study of nonlinear partial differential equations. The author is critical
of the widely held view that each nonlinear partial differential equation arising from
geometry or physics is special and often requires its own development. He believes
that the general approach based on symmetry is the right one.
The author mentions developments of these ideas that were originally formulated
by Lie and Klein in works of E. Noether, Bäcklund, É. Cartan, Ehresmann and others.
A lot of questions in this domain remain open, and this chapter will certainly give
the reader a new perspective on the geometric theory of nonlinear partial differential
equations.
In Chapter 7, Charles Frances surveys the modern developments of geometric
structures on manifolds in the lineage of Klein and Lie. The guiding idea in this

5
Lie has had a course at Oslo by Sylow on Galois and Abel theory before he meets Klein, but it is clear that
Klein also brought some of his knowledge to Lie.
xvi Introduction

chapter is the following question: When is the automorphism group of a geometric

structure a Lie group, and what can we say about the structure of such a Lie group?
The author considers the concept of Klein geometry, that is, a homogeneous space
acted upon by a Lie group, and a generalization of this notion, leading to the con-
cept of a Cartan geometry. (Cartan used the expression espace généralisé.) Besides
the classical geometries, like constant curvature spaces (Euclidean, Lobachevsky and
spherical) as well as projective geometry which unifies them, the notion of Cartan ge-
ometry includes several differential-geometric structures. These notions are defined
using fiber bundles and connections. They describe spaces of variable curvature and
they also lead to pseudo-Riemannian manifolds, conformal structures of type .p; q/,
affine connections, CR structures, and the so-called parabolic geometries. The author
presents a series of important results on this subject, starting with the theorem of My-
ers and Steenrod (1939) saying that the isometry group of any Riemannian manifold
is a Lie group, giving a bound on its dimension, and furthermore, it says that this
group is compact if the manifold is compact. This result gave rise to an abundance
of developments and generalizations. The author also explains in what sense pseudo-
Riemannian manifolds, affine connections and conformal structures in dimensions
 3 are rigid, symplectic manifolds are not rigid, and complex manifolds are of an
intermediate type.
Thus, two general important questions are addressed in this survey:
 What are the possible continuous groups that are the automorphism groups of
a geometry on a compact manifold?
 What is the influence of the automorphism group of a structure on the topology
or the diffeomorphism type of the underlying manifold?
Several examples and recent results are given concerning Cartan geometries and in
particular pseudo-Riemannian conformal structures.
Chapter 8, by Norbert A’Campo and Athanase Papadopoulos, concern transitional
geometry. This is a family of geometries which makes a continuous transition be-
tween hyperbolic and spherical geometry, passing through Euclidean geometry. The
space of transitional geometry is a fiber space over the interval Œ1; 1 where the fiber
above each point t is a space of constant curvature t 2 if t > 0 and of constant curva-
ture t 2 if t > 0. The fibers are examples of Klein geometries in the sense defined
in Chapter 7. The elements of each geometry are defined group-theoretically, in the
spirit of Klein’s Erlangen program. Points, lines, triangles, trigonometric formulae
and other geometric properties transit continuously between the various geometries.
In Chapter 9, by Athanase Papadopoulos and Sumio Yamada, the authors intro-
duce a notion of cross ratio which is proper to each of the three geometries: Euclidean,
spherical and hyperbolic. This highlights the relation between projective geometry
and these geometries. This is in the spirit of Klein’s view of the three constant cur-
vature geometries as part of projective geometry, which is the subject of Chapter 5 of
the present volume.
Chapter 10, by Yuri Suris, concerns the Erlangen program in the setting of dis-
crete differential geometry. This is a subject which recently emerged, whose aim is
to develop a theory which is the discrete analogue of classical differential geometry.
 Introduction xvii

It includes discrete versions of the differential geometry of curves and surfaces but
also higher-dimensional analogues. There are discrete notions of line, curve, plane,
volume, curvature, contact elements, etc. There is a unifying transformation group
approach in discrete differential geometry, where the discrete analogues of the clas-
sical objects of geometry become invariants of the respective transformation groups.
Several classical geometries survive in the discrete setting, and the author shows that
there is a discrete analogue of the fact shown by Klein that the transformation groups
of several geometries are subgroups of the projective transformation group, namely,
the subgroup preserving a quadric.
Examples of discrete differential geometric geometries reviewed in this chapter
include discrete line geometry and discrete line congruence, quadrics, Plücker line
geometry, Lie sphere geometry, Laguerre geometry and Möbius geometry. Important
notions such as curvature line parametrized surfaces, principal contact element nets,
discrete Ribeaucour transformations, circular nets and conical nets are discussed. The
general underlying idea is that the notion of transformation group survives in the dis-
cretization process. Like in the continuous case, the transformation group approach is
at the same time a unifying approach, and it is also related to the question of “multi-
dimensional consistency” of the geometry, which says roughly that a 4D consistency
implies consistency in all higher dimensions. The two principles – the transforma-
tion group principle and consistency principle – are the two guiding principles in this
chapter.
Chapter 11 by Catherine Meusburger is an illustration of the application of Klein’s
ideas in physics, and the main example studied is that of three-dimensional gravity,
that is, Einstein’s general relativity theory6 with one time and two space variables.
In three-dimensions, Einstein’s general relativity can be described in terms of cer-
tain domains of dependence in thee-dimensional Minkowski, de Sitter and anti de
Sitter space, which are homogeneous spaces. After a summary of the geometry of
spacetimes and a description of the gauge invariant phase spaces of these theories,
the author discusses the question of quantization of gravity and its relation to Klein’s
ideas of characterizing geometry by groups.
Besides presenting the geometrical and group-theoretical aspects of three-dimen-
sional gravity, the author mentions other facets of symmetry in physics, some of them
related to moduli spaces of flat connections and to quantum groups.
Chapter 12, by Jean-Bernard Zuber, is also on groups that appear in physics, as
group invariants associated to a geometry. Several physical fields are mentioned,
including crystallography, piezzoelectricity, general relativity, Yang–Mills theory,
quantum field theories, particle physics, the physics of strong interactions, electro-
magnetism, sigma-models, integrable systems, superalgebras and infinite-dimensional
algebras. We see again the work of Emmy Noether on group invariance principles
in variational problems. Representation theory entered into physics through quan-
tum mechanics, and the modern theory of quantum group is a by-product. The au-
thor comments on Noether’s celebrated paper which she presented at the occasion of
Klein’s academic Jubilee. It contains two of her theorems on conservation laws.
6
We recall by the way that Galileo’s relativity theory is at the origin of many of the twentieth century theories.
xviii Introduction

Today, groups are omnipresent in physics, and as Zuber puts it: “To look for
a group invariance whenever a new pattern is observed has become a second nature
for particle physicists”.
We hope that the various chapters of this volume will give to the reader a clear
idea of how group theory, geometry and physics are related to each other, the Erlangen
program being a major unifying element in this relation.

Lizhen Ji and Athanase Papadopoulos

 Chapter 1
Sophus Lie, a giant in mathematics

Lizhen Ji

Contents
1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2 Some general comments on Lie and his impact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
3 A glimpse of Lie’s early academic life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4 A mature Lie and his collaboration with Engel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5 Lie’s breakdown and a final major result . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
6 An overview of Lie’s major works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
7 Three fundamental theorems of Lie in the Lie theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
8 Relation with Klein I: the fruitful cooperation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
9 Relation with Klein II: conflicts and the famous preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
10 Relations with others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
11 Collected works of Lie: editing, commentaries and publication . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

1 Introduction
There are very few mathematicians and physicists who have not heard of Lie groups
or Lie algebras and made use of them in some way or another. If we treat discrete
or finite groups as special (or degenerate, zero-dimensional) Lie groups, then almost
every subject in mathematics uses Lie groups. As H. Poincaré told Lie [25] in October
1882, “all of mathematics is a matter of groups.” It is clear that the importance of
groups comes from their actions. For a list of topics of group actions, see [17].
Lie theory was the creation of Sophus Lie, and Lie is most famous for it. But Lie’s
work is broader than this. What else did Lie achieve besides his work in Lie theory?
This might not be so well known. The differential geometer S. S. Chern wrote in 1992
that “Lie was a great mathematician even without Lie groups” [7]. What did and can
Chern mean? We will attempt to give a summary of some major contributions of Lie
in 6.
One purpose of this chapter is to give a glimpse of Lie’s mathematical life by
recording several things which I have read about Lie and his work. Therefore, it is
short and emphasizes only a few things about his mathematics and life. For a fairly de-
tailed account of his life (but not his mathematics), see the full length biography [27].
We also provide some details about the unfortunate conflict between Lie and Klein
and the famous quote from Lie’s preface to the third volume of his books on trans-
2 Lizhen Ji

formation groups, which is usually only quoted without explaining the context. The
fruitful collaboration between Engel and Lie and the publication of Lie’s collected
works are also mentioned.
We hope that this chapter will be interesting and instructive to the reader of this
book and might serve as a brief introduction to the work and life of Lie discussed in
this book.

2 Some general comments on Lie and his impact

It is known that Lie’s main work is concerned with understanding how continuous
transformation groups provide an organizing principle for different areas of math-
ematics, including geometry, mechanics, and partial differential equations. But it
might not be well known that Lie’s collected works consist of 7 large volumes of the
total number of pages about 5600. (We should keep in mind that a substantial por-
tion of these pages are commentaries on his papers written by the editors. In spite
of this, Lie’s output was still enormous.) Probably it is also helpful to keep in mind
that Lie started to do mathematics at the age of 26 and passed away at 57. Besides
many papers, he wrote multiple books, which total over several thousands of pages.
According to Lie, only a part of his ideas had been put down into written form. In an
autobiographic note [9, p. 1], Lie wrote:

My life is actually quite incomprehensible to me. As a young man, I had no idea

that I was blessed with originality, Then, as a 26-year-old, I suddenly realized that
I could create. I read a little and began to produce. In the years 1869–1874, I had
a lot of ideas which, in the course of time, I have developed only very imperfectly.
In particular, it was group theory and its great importance for the differential
equations which interested me. But publication in this area went woefully slow. I
could not structure it properly, and I was always afraid of making mistakes. Not the
small inessential mistakes . . . No, it was the deep-rooted errors I feared. I am glad
that my group theory in its present state does not contain any fundamental errors.

Lie was a highly original and technically powerful mathematician. The recog-
nition of the idea of Lie groups (or transformation groups) took time. In 1870s, he
wrote in a letter [26, p. XVIII]:

If I only knew how to get the mathematicians interested in transformation groups

and their applications to differential equations. I am certain, absolutely certain in
my case, that these theories in the future will be recognized as fundamental. I want
to form such an impression now, since for one thing, I could then achieve ten times
as much.

In 1890, Lie was confident and wrote that he strongly believed that his work would
stand through all times, and in the years to come, it would be more and more appre-
ciated by the mathematical world.
 1 Sophus Lie, a giant in mathematics 3

Eduard Study was a privatdozent (lecturer) in Leipzig when Lie held the chair in
geometry there. In 1924, the mature Eduard Study summarized Lie as follows [26,
p. 24]:

Sophus Lie had the shortcomings of an autodidact, but he was also one of the most
brilliant mathematicians who ever lived. He possessed something which is not found
very often and which is now becoming even rarer, and he possessed it in abundance:
creative imagination. Coming generations will learn to appreciate this visionary’s
mind better than the present generation, who can only appreciate the mathemati-
cians’ sharp intellect. The all-encompassing scope of this man’s vision, which,
above all, demands recognition, is nearly completely lost. But, the coming gen-
eration [. . . ] will understand the importance of the theory of transformation groups
and ensure the scientific status that this magnificent work deserves.

What Lie studied are infinitesimal Lie groups, or essentially Lie algebras. Given
what H. Weyl and É. Cartan contributed to the global theory of Lie groups starting
around the middle of 1920s and hence made Lie groups one of the most basic and
essential objects in modern (or contemporary) mathematics, one must marvel at the
above visionary evaluation of Lie’s work by Study. For a fairly detailed overview of
the historical development of Lie groups with particular emphasis on the works of
Lie, Killing, É. Cartan and Weyl, see the book [14].
Two months after Lie died, a biography of him appeared in the American Mathe-
matical Monthly [12]. It was written by George Bruce Halsted, an active mathematics
educator and a mathematician at the University of Texas at Austin, who taught famous
mathematicians like R. L. Moore and L. E. Dickson. Reading it more than one hun-
dred years later, his strong statement might sound a bit surprising but is more justified
than before, “[. . . ] the greatest mathematician in the world, Sophus Lie, died [. . . ]
His work is cut short; his influence, his fame, will broaden, will tower from day to
day.”
Probably a more accurate evaluation of Lie was given by Engel in a memorial
speech on Lie [9, p. 24] in 1899:

If the capacity for discovery is the true measure of a mathematician’s greatness, then
Sophus Lie must be ranked among the foremost mathematicians of all time. Only
extremely few have opened up so many vast areas for mathematical research and
created such rich and wide-ranging methods as he [. . . ] In addition to a capacity
for discovery, we expect a mathematician to posses a penetrating mind, and Lie was
really an exceptionally gifted mathematician [. . . ] His efforts were based on tackling
problems which are important, but solvable, and it often happened that he was able
to solve problems which had withstood the efforts of other eminent mathematicians.

In this sense, Lie was a giant for his deep and original contribution to mathematics,
and is famous not for other reasons. (One can easily think of several mathematicians,
without naming them, who are famous for various things besides mathematics). Inci-
dentally, he was also a giant in the physical sense. There are some vivid descriptions
of Lie by people such as É. Cartan [1, p. 7], Engel [27, p. 312], and his physics
4 Lizhen Ji

colleague Ostwald at Leipzig [27, p. 396]. See also [27, p. 3]. For some interest-
ing discussions on the relations between giants and scientists, see [11, pp. 163–164,
p. 184] and [22, pp. 9–13].

3 A glimpse of Lie’s early academic life

Lie was born on December 17, 1842. His father, Johann Herman Lie, was a Lutheran
minister. He was the youngest of the six children of the family. Lie first attended
school in the town of Moss in South Eastern Norway and on the eastern side of the
Oslo Fjord. In 1857 he entered Nissen’s Private Latin School in Christiania, which
became Oslo in 1925. At that time, he decided to pursue a military career, but his poor
eyesight made this impossible, and he entered University of Christiania to pursue
a more academic life.
During his university time, Lie studied science in a broad sense. He took math-
ematics courses and attended lectures by teachers of high quality. For example, he
attended lectures by Sylow in 1862.1
Though Lie studied with some good mathematicians and did well in most courses,
on his graduation in 1865, he did not show any special ability for mathematics or any
particular liking for it. Lie could not decide what subject to pursue and he gave
some private lessons and also volunteered some lectures for a student union while
trying to make his decision. He knew he wanted an academic career and thought for
a while that astronomy might be the right topic. He also learnt some mechanics, and
wondered about botany, zoology or physics. Lie reached the not-so-tender age of 26
in 1868 and was still not sure what he should pursue as a career. But this year was
a big turning point for him.
In June 1868, the Tenth Meeting of Scandinavian Natural Sciences was held in
Christiania. It attracted 368 participants. Lie attended many lectures and was par-
ticularly influenced by the lecture of a former student of the great French geometer
Michel Chasles, which referred to works of Chasles, Möbius, and Plücker.
It seems that the approaching season, the autumn of 1868, became one long con-
tinuing period of work for Sophus Lie, with his frequent borrowing of books from the
library. In addition to Chasles, Möbius and Plücker, Lie discovered the Frenchman
Poncelet, the Englishman Hamilton, and the Italian Cremona, as well as others who
had made important contributions to algebraic and analytic geometry.
Lie plowed through many volumes of the leading mathematical journals from
Paris and Berlin, and in the Science Students Association he gave several lectures
during the spring of 1869 on what he called his “Theory of the imaginaries”, and
on how information on real geometric objects could be transferred to his “imaginary
objects.”
1 Ludwig Sylow (1832–1918) was Norwegian, like Lie. He is now famous and remembered for the Sylow
subgroups. At that time, he was not on the permanent staff of the university of Christiania, but he was substitut-
ing for a regular faculty member and taught a course. In this course, he explained Abel’s and Galois’ work on
algebraic equations. But it seems that Lie did not understand or remember the content of this course, and it was
Klein who re-explained these theories to him and made a huge impact on Lie’s mathematical life.
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