Download or read book Emergence of the Theory of Lie Groups written by Thomas Hawkins and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The great Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie developed the general theory of transformations in the 1870s, and the first part of the book properly focuses on his work. In the second part the central figure is Wilhelm Killing, who developed structure and classification of semisimple Lie algebras. The third part focuses on the developments of the representation of Lie algebras, in particular the work of Elie Cartan. The book concludes with the work of Hermann Weyl and his contemporaries on the structure and representation of Lie groups which serves to bring together much of the earlier work into a coherent theory while at the same time opening up significant avenues for further work.