Prof MS Raghunathan will give a course of lectures aimed at beginning PhD students

on a topic of basic importance to all of mathematics. Title and abstract are given below.

The course will begin on Monday 17th October at 4pm in the room A1-A2 of CDEEP on the ground floor of the Math building. Each lecture will be of 90 minutes. The course will run

roughly through the middle of December, so about 8 lectures.  Since Monday 24th October is  Deepawali, the lecture will be organized on 26th afternoon for which I will separately announce the precise timing.

It will be a lecture course in hybrid mode so that others not in IIT can also benifit from this course. Feel free to tell your friends in case it may interest them. Here is the zoom link in case you cannot attend in person:

Hope to see you there!

Best wishes, Dipendra

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Title: Compact Lie groups and their representations

Abstract: In this course I will first talk about the structure theory of compact Lie groups, beginning with the fact that a compact connected Lie group is an almost direct product of the identity connected component of its centre and its commutator subgroup (which is closed subgroup) conjugacy of maximal tori and the fact that every element is contained in a maximal torus. In the course of proving these results, some results on the topology of compact Lie groups which will also be proved. I will then establish Weyl's theorem which asserts that if G is a compact connected Lie group and [G,G]=G, π1(G,e) is finite (and hence the universal covering of a compact group whose abelianisation is trivial is a compact. Then I will introduce roots and weights and the Dynkin diagram of the compact group and sketch a proof of the fact that the Dynkin diagram determines the group locally. The remaining lectures will be devoted to representation theory. I will establish the bijective correspondence between 'Dominant Weights' and irreducible representations. The course will end with the Weyl Character Formula for the character of an irreducible representation corresponding to a 'dominant' weight. The entire theory is essentially  the same as the representation theory of reductive algebraic groups. I will off and on indicate how the two are related.  
I will be assuming some familiarity with basic theory of Lie groups such as the correspondence between Lie sub-algebras of the Lie group and Lie subgroups of the Lie groups; also with some basic results from algebraic topology.