Gerhard Hochschild



Gerhard Paul Hochschild (April 29, 1915 – July 8, 2010) was a German-born American mathematician, who did research on Lie groups, algebraic groups, homological algebra and algebraic number theory. He is known for Hochschild homology. In 1979 he was elected to United States National Academy of Sciences.

Quotes

 * "... the theory of valuations may be viewed as a branch of topological algebra. In fact, historically speaking, it represents the first invasion of topology, more precisely, of early metric topology, into the domains of algebra. The introduction of metric methods into algebra has been so fruitful that today many of the deeper algebraic theories carry their mark. In this regard, one should distinguish between the classical use in algebra of the natural metric of the real or complex number fields, such as in proving the "fundamental theorem of algebra," and the much more recent use of the far less evident metrics which are derived from arithmetic notions of divisibility and which constitute the principal notion of valuation theory. Such a metric occurs for the first time in Hensel's construction of the p-adic numbers ..."


 * Let F be a field of characteristic 0, and let F be a finite dimensional vector space over F. Let E denote the algebra of all endomorphisms of V, and let L be any Lie subalgebra of E. Among the algebraic Lie algebras contained in E and containing L, there is one that is contained in all of them, and this is called the algebraic hull of L in E. Here, an algebraic Lie algebra is defined as the Lie algebra of an algebraic group. It is an easy consequence of the definitions that if A and B are algebraic groups of automorphisms of V such that A⊂B then the Lie algebra of A is contained in the Lie algebra of B. Hence the existence of the algebraic hull of L is an immediate consequence of the following basic result: let G be the intersection of all algebraic groups of automorphisms of V whose Lie algebras contain L.


 * A Lie algebra is said to be algebraic if it is isomorphic with the Lie algebra of an affine algebraic group. In view of the fact that entirely unrelated affine algebraic groups (typically, vector groups and toroidal groups) may have isomorphic Lie algebras, this notion of algebraic Lie algebra calls for some clarification. The most relevant result in this direction is due to M. Goto. It says that a finite- dimensional Lie algebra L over a field of characteristic 0 is algebraic if and only if the image of L under the adjoint representation is the Lie algebra of an algebraic subgroup of the group of automorphisms of L ...


 * ... Lie algebras have a significance reaching beyond the domain of algebra, because they play such an important role in the theory of Lie groups. Thus, classical Lie algebra theory is strongly dominated by the fact that the finite-dimensional analytic representations of a simply connected analytic group are identifiable with the finite-dimensional representations of its Lie algebra. In the theory of infinite-dimensional representations, the connection with Lie algebra representations is somewhat tenuous, but it is nevertheless at the core of the major advances made in that theory during the last 30 years.