General Linear Groups are Lie Groups

One of the most important examples of a Lie group we’ve already seen: the general linear group $GL(V)$ of a finite dimensional vector space $V$ . Of course for the vector space $\mathbb{R}^n$ this is the same as — or at least isomorphic to — the group $GL_n(\mathbb{R})$ of all invertible $n\times n$ real matrices, so that’s a Lie group we can really get our hands on. And if $V$ has dimension $n$ , then $V\cong\mathbb{R}^n$ , and thus $GL(V)\cong GL_n(\mathbb{R})$ .

So, how do we know that it’s a Lie group? Well, obviously it’s a group, but what about the topology? The matrix group $GL_n(\mathbb{R})$ sits inside the algebra $M_n(\mathbb{R})$ of all $n\times n$ matrices, which is an $n^2$ -dimensional vector space. Even better, it’s an open subset, which we can see by considering the (continuous) map $\mathrm{det}:M_n(\mathbb{R})\to\mathbb{R}$ . Since $GL_n(\mathbb{R})$ is the preimage of $\mathbb{R}\setminus\{0\}$ — which is an open subset of $\mathbb{R}$ — $GL_n(\mathbb{R})$ is an open subset of $M_n(\mathbb{R})$ .

So we can conclude that $GL_n(\mathbb{R})$ is an open submanifold of $M_n$ , which comes equipped with the standard differentiable structure on $\mathbb{R}^{n^2}$ . Matrix multiplication is clearly smooth, since we can write each component of a product matrix $AB$ as a (quadratic) polynomial in the entries of $A$ and $B$ . As for inversion, Cramer’s rule expresses the entries of the inverse matrix $A^{-1}$ as the quotient of a (degree $n-1$ ) polynomial in the entries of $A$ and the determinant of $A$ . So long as $A$ is invertible these are two nonzero smooth functions, and thus their quotient is smooth at $A$ .

June 9, 2011 - Posted by John Armstrong | Algebra, Differential Topology, Group theory, Topology

3 Comments »

[…] is an open submanifold of , the tangent space of at any matrix is the same as the tangent space to at . And since is […]

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[…] on compact manifolds are complete, Maps Intertwining Vector Fields, The Lie algebra of a Lie group, General linear groups are Lie groups, The Lie algebra of a general linear […]

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[…] — homomorphisms to the general linear group of some vector space or another. But since is a Lie group, we can use this additional structure as well. And so we say that a representation of a Lie group […]

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This is mainly an expository blath, with occasional high-level excursions, humorous observations, rants, and musings. The main-line exposition should be accessible to the “Generally Interested Lay Audience”, as long as you trace the links back towards the basics. Check the sidebar for specific topics (under “Categories”).

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