Tannaka-Krein duality

In mathematics, Tannaka–Krein duality theory concerns the interaction of a compact topological group and its category of linear representations. It is a natural extension of Pontryagin duality, between compact and discrete commutative topological groups, to groups that are compact but noncommutative. The theory is named for two men, the Soviet mathematician Mark Grigorievich Krein, and the Japanese Tadao Tannaka. In contrast to the case of commutative groups considered by Lev Pontryagin, the notion dual to a noncommutative compact group is not a group, but a category Π(G) with some additional structures, formed by the finite-dimensional representations of G.

Duality theorems of Tannaka and Krein describe the converse passage from the category Π(G) back to the group G, allowing one to recover the group from its category of representations. Moreover, they in effect completely characterize all categories that can arise from a group in this fashion. Alexander Grothendieck later showed that by a similar process, Tannaka duality can be extended to the case of algebraic groups: see tannakian category. Meanwhile, the original theory of Tannaka and Krein continued to be developed and refined by mathematical physicists. A generalization of Tannaka–Krein theory provides the natural framework for studying representations of quantum groups, and is currently being extended to quantum supergroups, quantum groupoids and their dual quantum algebroids.

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