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Tag: Procesi

THE rationality problem

Published April 27, 2007 by lieven

This morning, Esther Beneish
arxived the paper The center of the generic algebra of degree p that may contain the most
significant advance in my favourite problem for over 15 years! In it she
claims to prove that the center of the generic division algebra of
degree p is stably rational for all prime values p. Let me begin by
briefly explaining what the problem is all about. Consider one n by n
matrix A which is sufficiently general, then it will have all its
eigenvalues distinct, but then it is via the Jordan normal form theorem uniquely
determined upto conjugation (that is, base change) by its
characteristic polynomial. In
other words, the conjugacy class of a sufficiently general n by n matrix
depends freely on the coefficients of the characteristic polynomial
(which are the n elementary symmetric functions in the eigenvalues of
the matrix). Now what about couples of n by n matrices (A,B) under
simultaneous conjugation (that is all couples of the form $~(g A
g^{-1}, g B g^{-1}) $ for some invertible n by n matrix g) ??? So,
does there exist a sort of Jordan normal form for couples of n by n
matrices which are sufficiently general? That is, are there a set of
invariants for such couples which determine it is freely upto
simultaneous conjugation?

For couples of 2 by 2 matrices, Claudio Procesi rediscovered an old
result due to James Sylvester saying
that this is indeed the case and that the set of invariants consists of
the five invariants Tr(A),Tr(B),Det(A),Det(B) and Tr(AB). Now, Claudio
did a lot more in his paper. He showed that if you could prove this for
couples of matrices, you can also do it for triples, quadruples even any
k-tuples of n by n matrices under simultaneous conjugation. He also
related this problem to the center of the generic division algebra of
degree n (which was introduced earlier by Shimshon Amitsur in a rather
cryptic manner and for a while he simply refused to believe Claudio’s
description of this division algebra as the one generated by two
_generic_ n by n matrices, that is matrices filled with independent
variables). Claudio also gave the description of the center of this
algebra as a field of lattice-invariants (over the symmetric group S(n)
) which was crucial in subsequent investigations. If you are interested
in the history of this problem, its connections with Brauer group
problems and invariant theory and a short description of the tricks used
in proving the results I’ll mention below, you might have a look at the
talk Centers of Generic Division Algebras, the rationality problem 1965-1990
I gave in Chicago in 1990.

The case of couples of 3 by 3 matrices was finally
settled in 1979 by Ed Formanek and a
year later he was able to solve also the case of couples of 4 by 4
matrices in a fabulous paper. In it, he used solvability of S(4) in an
essential way thereby hinting at the possibility that the problem might
no longer have an affirmative answer for larger values of n. When I read
his 4×4 paper I believed that someone able to prove such a result must
have an awesome insight in the inner workings of matrices and decided to
dedicate myself to this problem the moment I would get a permanent
job… . But even then it is a reckless thing to do. Spending all of
your time to such a difficult problem can be frustrating as there is no
guarantee you’ll ever write a paper. Sure, you can find translations of
the problem and as all good problems it will have connections with other
subjects such as moduli spaces of vectorbundles and of quiver
representations, but to do the ‘next number’ is another matter.

Fortunately, early 1990, together with
Christine Bessenrodt we were
able to do the next two ‘prime cases’ : couples of 5 by 5 and couples of
7 by 7 matrices (Katsylo and Aidan Schofield had already proved that if
you could do it for couples of k by k and l by l matrices and if k and l
were coprime then you could also do it for couples of kl by kl matrices,
so the n=6 case was already done). Or did we? Well not quite, our
methods only allowed us to prove that the center is stably rational
that is, it becomes rational by freely adjoining extra variables. There
are examples known of stably rational fields which are NOT rational, but
I guess most experts believe that in the case of matrix-invariants
stable rationality will imply rationality. After this paper both
Christine and myself decided to do other things as we believed we had
reached the limits of what the lattice-method could do and we thought a
new idea was required to go further. If today’s paper by Esther turns
out to be correct, we were wrong. The next couple of days/weeks I’ll
have a go at her paper but as my lattice-tricks are pretty rusty this
may take longer than expected. Still, I see that in a couple of weeks
there will be a meeting in
Atlanta were Esther
and all experts in the field will be present (among them David Saltman
and Jean-Louis Colliot-Thelene) so we will know one way or the other
pretty soon. I sincerely hope Esther’s proof will stand the test as she
was the only one courageous enough to devote herself entirely to the
problem, regardless of slow progress.

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Jacobian update

Published November 13, 2004 by lieven

One way to increase the blogshare-value of this site might be to
give readers more of what they want. In fact, there is an excellent
guide for those who really want to increase traffic on their site
called 26
Steps to 15k a Day. A somewhat sobering suggestion is rule S :

“Think about what people want. They
aren't coming to your site to view “your content”,
they are coming to your site looking for “their
content”.”

But how do we know what
people want? Well, by paying attention to Google-referrals according
to rule U :

“The search engines will
tell you exactly what they want to be fed – listen closely, there is
gold in referral logs, it's just a matter of panning for
it.”

And what do these Google-referrals
show over the last couple of days? Well, here are the top recent
key-words given to Google to get here :

13 :
carolyn dean jacobian conjecture
11 : carolyn dean jacobian

9 : brauer severi varieties
7 : latexrender
7 : brauer severi
7 : spinor bundles
7 : ingalls
azumaya
6 : [Unparseable or potentially dangerous latex
formula Error 6 ]
6 : jacobian conjecture carolyn dean

See a pattern? People love to hear right now about
the solution of the Jacobian conjecture in the plane by Carolyn Dean.
Fortunately, there are a couple of things more I can say about this
and it may take a while before you know why there is a photo of Tracy
Chapman next to this post…

First, it seems I only got
part of the Melvin Hochster
email. Here is the final part I was unaware of (thanks to not even wrong)

Earlier papers established the following: if
there is
a counterexample, the leading forms of $f$ and $g$
may
be assumed to have the form $(x^a y^b)^J$ and $(x^a
y^b)^K$,
where $a$ and $b$ are relatively prime and neither
$J$
nor $K$ divides the other (Abhyankar, 1977). It is known
that
$a$ and $b$ cannot both be $1$ (Lang, 1991) and that one
may
assume that $C[f,g]$ does not contain a degree one
polynomial
in $x, y$ (Formanek, 1994).

Let $D_x$ and $D_y$ indicate partial differentiation with respect

to $x$ and $y$, respectively. A difficult result of Bass (1989)

asserts that if $D$ is a non-zero operator that is a polynomial

over $C$ in $x D_x$ and $y D_y$, $G$ is in $C[x,y]$ and $D(G)$

is in $C[f,g]$, then $G$ is in $C[f,g]$.

The proof
proceeds by starting with $f$ and $g$ that give
a
counterexample, and recursively constructing sequences of
elements and derivations with remarkable, intricate and
surprising relationships. Ultimately, a contradiction is
obtained by studying a sequence of positive integers associated
with the degrees of the elements constructed. One delicate
argument shows that the sequence is bounded. Another delicate
argument shows that it is not. Assuming the results described
above, the proof, while complicated, is remarkably self-contained
and can be understood with minimal background in algebra.

  • Mel Hochster

Speaking about the Jacobian
conjecture-post at not even wrong and
the discussion in the comments to it : there were a few instances I
really wanted to join in but I'll do it here. To begin, I was a
bit surprised of the implicit attack in the post

Dean hasn't published any papers in almost 15 years and is
nominally a lecturer in mathematics education at Michigan.

But this was immediately addressed and retracted in
the comments :

Just curious. What exactly did
you mean by “nominally a lecturer”?
Posted by mm
at November 10, 2004 10:54 PM

I don't know
anything about Carolyn Dean personally, just that one place on the
Michigan web-site refers to her as a “lecturer”, another
as a “visiting lecturer”. As I'm quite well aware from
personal experience, these kinds of titles can refer to all sorts of
different kinds of actual positions. So the title doesn't tell you
much, which is what I was awkwardly expressing.
Posted by Peter
at November 10, 2004 11:05 PM

Well, I know a few things
about Carolyn Dean personally, the most relevant being that she is a
very careful mathematician. I met her a while back (fall of 1985) at
UCSD where she was finishing (or had finished) her Ph.D. If Lance
Small's description of me would have been more reassuring, we
might even have ended up sharing an apartment (quod non). Instead I
ended up with Claudio
Procesi… Anyway, it was a very enjoyable month with a group
of young starting mathematicians and I fondly remember some
dinner-parties we organized. The last news I heard about Carolyn was
10 to 15 years ago in Oberwolfach when it was rumoured that she had
solved the Jacobian conjecture in the plane… As far as I recall,
the method sketched by Hochster in his email was also the one back
then. Unfortunately, at the time she still didn't have all pieces
in place and a gap was found (was it by Toby Stafford? or was it
Hochster?, I forgot). Anyway, she promptly acknowledged that there was
a gap.
At the time I was dubious about the approach (mostly
because I was secretly trying to solve it myself) but today my gut
feeling is that she really did solve it. In recent years there have
been significant advances in polynomial automorphisms (in particular
the tame-wild problem) and in the study of the Hilbert scheme of
points in the plane (which I always thought might lead to a proof) so
perhaps some of these recent results did give Carolyn clues to finish
off her old approach? I haven't seen one letter of the proof so
I'm merely speculating here. Anyway, Hochster's assurance that
the proof is correct is good enough for me right now.
Another
discussion in the NotEvenWrong-comments was on the issue that several
old problems were recently solved by people who devoted themselves for
several years solely to that problem and didn't join the parade of
dedicated follower of fashion-mathematicians.

It is remarkable that the last decade has seen great progress in
math (Wiles proving Fermat's Last Theorem, Perelman proving the
Poincare Conjecture, now Dean the Jacobian Conjecture), all achieved
by people willing to spend 7 years or more focusing on a single
problem. That's not the way academic research is generally
structured, if you want grants, etc. you should be working on much
shorter term projects. It's also remarkable that two out of three
of these people didn't have a regular tenured position.

I think particle theory should learn from this. If
some of the smarter people in the field would actually spend 7 years
concentrating on one problem, the field might actually go somewhere
instead of being dead in the water
Posted by Peter at November
13, 2004 08:56 AM

Here we come close to a major problem of
today's mathematics. I have the feeling that far too few
mathematicians dedicate themselves to problems in which they have a
personal interest, independent of what the rest of the world might
think about these problems. Far too many resort to doing trendy,
technical mathematics merely because it is approved by so called
'better' mathematicians. Mind you, I admit that I did fall in
that trap myself several times but lately I feel quite relieved to be
doing just the things I like to do no matter what the rest may think
about it. Here is a little bit of advice to some colleagues : get
yourself an iPod and take
some time to listen to songs like this one :

Don't be tempted by the shiny apple
Don't you eat
of a bitter fruit
Hunger only for a taste of justice
Hunger only for a world of truth
'Cause all that you have
is your soul

from Tracy Chapman's All
that you have is your soul

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smooth Brauer-Severis

Published September 28, 2004 by lieven

Around the
same time Michel Van den Bergh introduced his Brauer-Severi schemes,
[Claudio Procesi][1] (extending earlier work of [Bill Schelter][2])
introduced smooth orders as those orders $A$ in a central simple algebra
$\Sigma$ (of dimension $n^2$) such that their representation variety
$\mathbf{trep}_n~A$ is a smooth variety. Many interesting orders are smooth
: hereditary orders, trace rings of generic matrices and more generally
size n approximations of formally smooth algebras (that is,
non-commutative manifolds). As in the commutative case, every order has
a Zariski open subset where it is a smooth order. The relevance of
this notion to the study of Brauer-Severi varieties is that $X_A$ is a
smooth variety whenever $A$ is a smooth order. Indeed, the Brauer-Severi
scheme was the orbit space of the principal $GL_n$-fibration on the
Brauer-stable representations (see [last time][3]) which form a Zariski
open subset of the smooth variety $\mathbf{trep}_n~A \times k^n$. In fact,
in most cases the reverse implication will also hold, that is, if $X_A$
is smooth then usually A is a smooth order. However, for low n,
there are some counterexamples. Consider the so called quantum plane
$A_q=k_q[x,y]~:~yx=qxy$ with $~q$ an $n$-th root of unity then one
can easily prove (using the fact that the smooth order locus of $A_q$ is
everything but the origin in the central variety $~\mathbb{A}^2$) that
the singularities of the Brauer-Severi scheme $X_A$ are the orbits
corresponding to those nilpotent representations $~\phi : A \rightarrow
M_n(k)$ which are at the same time singular points in $\mathbf{trep}_n~A$
and have a cyclic vector. As there are singular points among the
nilpotent representations, the Brauer-Severi scheme will also be
singular except perhaps for small values of $n$. For example, if
$~n=2$ the defining relation is $~xy+yx=0$ and any trace preserving
representation has a matrix-description $~x \rightarrow
\begin{bmatrix} a & b \\ c & -a \end{bmatrix}~y \rightarrow
\begin{bmatrix} d & e \\ f & -d \end{bmatrix}$ such that
$~2ad+bf+ec = 0$. That is, $~\mathbf{trep}_2~A = \mathbb{V}(2ad+bf+ec)
\subset \mathbb{A}^6$ which is an hypersurface with a unique
singular point (the origin). As this point corresponds to the
zero-representation (which does not have a cyclic vector) the
Brauer-Severi scheme will be smooth in this case. [Colin
Ingalls][4] extended this calculation to show that the Brauer-Severi
scheme is equally smooth when $~n=3$ but has a unique (!) singular point
when $~n=4$. So probably all Brauer-Severi schemes for $n \geq 4$ are
indeed singular. I conjecture that this is a general feature for
Brauer-Severi schemes of families (depending on the p.i.-degree $n$) of
non-smooth orders.

[1]: http://venere.mat.uniroma1.it/people/procesi/
[2]: http://www.fact-index.com/b/bi/bill_schelter.html
[3]: https://lievenlb.local/index.php?p=341
[4]: http://kappa.math.unb.ca/~colin/

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