May 16, 2024 HiPHIs seminar - Jean Delsarte's lectures on Lie groups and algebras (1938-1950)
Tuesday, May 16, 2024 from 2 p.m. to 3:45 p.m., UM Faculty of Science, classroom SC-11.01, free admission (Triolet campus, building 11 RdC, Place Eugène-Bataillon | as part of the 7th PhilMathMed Meetings)
From the Julia Seminar to Bourbaki: Jean Delsarte's Lectures on Lie Groups and Algebras (1938–1950)
Christopher Eckes
Historian of mathematics, Lecturer-researcher at the University of Lorraine, Henri-Poincaré Archives, Nancy
Summary | abbreviated title: Delsarte's Lectures on Lie Groups and Algebras
The archives of Jean Delsarte (1903–1968, founding member of the Bourbaki group) are currently kept in the library of the Institut Élie-Cartan in Lorraine and have so far been used sometimes from the point of view of his participation in the activities of this collective of mathematicians, sometimes according to his career at the Faculty of Sciences of Nancy. However, the Delsarte fonds contains a whole series of lecture notes that have been virtually untapped until then, three of them dealing with groups and Lie algebras over a period from 1938 to the early 1950s.
On the basis of these lecture notes, we will first show that the lectures dedicated to the work of Élie Cartan that were presented at the Julia seminar in 1936–1937 constitute an obvious source of inspiration for Delsarte in his courses preparing for the certificate of higher analysis, which focused specifically on groups and Lie algebras at the end of the 1930s. We will then establish that this theme was on the agenda of the advanced mathematics seminar that Delsarte set up in Nancy from 1947 and which led to the creation of the Élie-Cartan Institute, which was made official in 1953. Finally, we will see to what extent the project of a book on groups and Lie algebras, initiated by the members of Bourbaki after the Second World War, constitutes a major source of inspiration for Delsarte, as evidenced by a third and final advanced course he dedicated to Lie groups and algebras in the early 1950s.
Joint invitation with the IMAG Institut Montpellier Alexandre Grothendieck – as part of the 7th PhilMathMéd Meetings (Philosophy, History and Didactics of Mathematics in the Mediterranean) on 16 and 17 May 2024 in Montpellier on the theme "writing, learning and teaching mathematics".
See the program (full conference participation on registration, free).
