Talk:Pontryagin duality

It would be nice to add the dual of the set of p-adic numbers in the section Examples [march, 10, 2009].

Done. Ringspectrum (talk) 08:42, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Just a note here with a copy of a discussion on User talk:Charles Matthews outlining plans for three pages: Pontryagin duality, dual group and Harmonic analysis. This is just in case anyone else wants to do anything to these pages.

Hi Charles,

Pontryagin duality looks good, but I wondered why you created this instead of adding to and/or rewriting dual group. Both are about the same thing at different levels of sophistication. I threw dual group together the other day to expand an ugly stub -- essentially the first few lines describing characters. I have no problem with dual group being improved -- such is the way of the wiki. It suffers from the its history and while trying to be consistent with related pages. The best solution may be a merged page under Pontryagin duality (a more accurate title) with dual group redirecting.

If a merge was to happen, dual group suffers from not having any reasons for wanting duality (which yours covers from a couple of angles) and Pontryagin duality suffers from not actually saying what the dual group is (in terms that an undergrad maths student can handle). Your account of the development of the theory is also better. Maybe a solution is to import and tidy up some of the material on the concrete construction of the dual group (characters, topology) from dual group and make dual group a redirect? Possibly keep the classical examples as well, as they tie it to the Fourier transform/series articles. My attempt at referencing was deliberately lazy, so could be improved.

I have also since noticed some overlap with my version of dual group with the middle chunk of Harmonic analysis. I think it doesn't really belong there, as harmonic analysis on LCA groups is only a part of HA, whereas it reads as though it is the most important idea. My feeling is that HA (also served by a redirect from Fourier analysis) should really be a high-level page with a general flavour of what harmonic analysis is about, some history and many links to the disparate fields that come under or are related to HA - from the abstract to the applications (classical things like PDE solutions through to wavelets and whatever else). Do you know of anyone who has an interest in (or oversees/coordinates) this higher-level organisation of WP? The Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics page only deals with things at the article level.

Cheers, AndrewKepert 01:21, 18 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Generally, I agree with your assessment. I wrote the PD page quickly once I'd actually found dual group (I've thought subsequently of adding a bit more, on discrete and compact R-modules, and End(G) = opposite ring of End (G^)). It could indeed be good to merge the two under PD as main title, putting the dual group material first in the article (and moving across from HA anything that is really about LCA in general as you suggest).

There is no 'they' who sorts out policy-level stuff. We're on our own here ...

Charles Matthews 10:12, 18 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Thanks Charles - yes I know Wiki is anarchic. I also thought that informing somebody(s) who might consider the higher-level organisation as their patch might bring in a few tips and avoid subsequent angst when somebody reverted the lot!

I will go ahead with the merge as discussed (not today - too busy) and strip the corresponding section out of Harmonic analysis. I'll also tidy up notation - I prefer &gamma ∈ Γ = G^ to φ ∈ G' myself, but will change additive notation in the group to multiplicative. I think the merge will work well, given the complementary POV of the two pages. Then I will start thinking about how HA should be structured and fleshing it out. Hopefully whatever I do will offend sufficiently many people, thus attracting interest and contributions.

Cheers AndrewKepert 01:00, 19 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I've done the big move from dual group, and added some headers. This leaves detailed editing of the page.

Charles Matthews 08:47, 19 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Now moved the LCA stuff from harmonic analysis, and spliced it in. Leaves the page structure OK, I think - but needing a thorough edit on notation, excess links and so on.

Charles Matthews 09:30, 19 Nov 2003 (UTC)

What is it good for?

Can someone give some examples that show where Pontryagin duality can be used to prove something or understand something better? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 217.189.228.213 (talk) 08:49, 3 May 2007 (UTC).

Dual of finite-dimensional vector space

It is analogous to the dual vector space of a finite-dimensional vector space: a vector space V and its dual vector space V * are not naturally isomorphic

This is unclear, but seems to say that a finite-dimensional vector space is not isomorphic to its dual. That's not right, is it? 72.75.67.226 (talk) 01:53, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

It says they are not naturally isomorphic (a term from category theory), but they do become isomorphic once we pick a basis. See for example Natural_transformation#Further_examples. Terminus0 (talk) 05:50, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Topological Groups

I think one should require the the topological group is also Hausdorff space. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.64.102.21 (talk) 13:12, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

What is it?

The article's first para gives a suitably gentle description of where Pontryagin duality might be useful, how, and why. But I don't anywhere find anything approaching a definition. The overall feeling I get from this article is similar to the effect I'd expect if the article on lion consisted of this text:

"Lions are native to Africa. The males have manes. Their complex behavior, including apex predation, gives them a central role in the culture of many indigenous social groups. See also: circus."

(Ummm, OK, but shouldn't we mention, for instance, that lion is a species (Panthera leo) of large cat?)

Can somebody please mend this shortcoming. I'd do it myself if I knew enough about the subject matter.—PaulTanenbaum (talk) 16:18, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

About non-commutative theories

Excuse me, this propositions is a little bit vague to me:

Such a theory cannot exist in the same form for non-commutative groups G, since in that case the appropriate dual object G^ of isomorphism classes of representations cannot only contain one-dimensional representations, and will fail to be a group.

Is it possible to reformulate it is such a way that it could be presented as a theorem?

And if you don't mind, I would insert here a little review of non-commutative generalizations.Eozhik (talk) 08:39, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Seems to be all that statement says is, for non-abelian groups, one cannot multiply irreducible unitary representations to get another one unlike the characters in the abelian case. That said, clarification/elaboration is always good. The simplest nonabelian case is listed in See Also:Peter-Weyl theorem. Maybe the main body of the article can say something about that. Mct mht (talk) 10:12, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

But if we do not see how to multiply representations, I suppose, this doesn't mean that such a multiplication does'n t exist... Perhaps one can define an operation of multiplication such that the space of all irreducible unitary representrations becomes a group, is it possible? Eozhik (talk) 14:02, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

In a very naive sense, and assuming choice, yes. The axiom of choice implies that every nonempty set carries some group structure, so we can pick one essentially at random for each of our sets of representations. Of course, this will not have any nice properties; the interesting question is whether there is a functor between appropriate categories that we can define. Honestly, the statement above confuses me, too: what isomorphism classes are we taking? where did the notion of dimension come in? I suspect that there is not such a functor; perhaps one could prove this by taking a small (i.e. finite) nonabelian group and doing some casework. In particular, functoriality (which is really what we want) would require our multiplication on characters to satisfy (χf)•(ρf) = (χ•ρ)f where the dot is our supposed multiplication and juxtaposition is computation, for every homomorphism f : A -> A, A being the nonabelian group under consideration. Cyrapas (talk) 01:47, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Invertibility of canonical map

In the section about the duality theorem and the canonical map, the canonical map is defined, but it is not shown to be an isomorphism. This, to me, seems a rather important step, since in other contexts (e.g. infinite-dimensional vector spaces) analogous canonical maps can fail to be isomorphisms. Presumably this proof uses the fact that the groups are "small" because they are locally compact. Does anyone know it? Cyrapas (talk) 01:52, 21 January 2014 (UTC)