Date & Time: Wednesday, February 04, 2009, 14:30-15:30.
Venue: Ramanujan Hall

Title: A Historical Review of the Development of the Structure of the General Linear Group over Commutative Rings and its Impact on Mathematics in General

Speaker: Anthony Bak, Universität Bielefeld

Abstract: This talk begins by recalling the very early days of this topic, at the end of the 19th century when the concept of an abstract group was being formed and the work of Galois was only beginning to be understood and further developed. At this time Jordan began investigating the general linear group over finite prime fields. His interest in the general linear group was motivated by its role as a Galois group. His work was extended first to general finite fields and then by Dickson, working at Chicago, to all fields. Some work was done in the first part of the 20th century over the integers, but the real breakthroughs and advances began only after the second world war with the results of Bass, Wilson, Suslin, and many others and the interplay of these results with the founding and establishment of the subject algebraic K-theory. Describing these developments will be the focus of my talk.