Friday October 9, 2009
4:00 - 5:00 pm
Milner Hall 317
4:00 - 5:00 pm
Milner Hall 317
Nicolas Monod, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Large forests and Littlewood
Motivated by a classical result in functional analysis, Dixmier asked in 1950 which group representations can be made unitary. This question is still open, but I will report on a modest progress obtained with Epstein and Ozawa. We approach the question with ideas borrowed from XIXth century electricity theory as well as from contemporary percolation theory. As a result, we obtain notably non-unitarizable representations for Burnside groups.
Large forests and Littlewood
Motivated by a classical result in functional analysis, Dixmier asked in 1950 which group representations can be made unitary. This question is still open, but I will report on a modest progress obtained with Epstein and Ozawa. We approach the question with ideas borrowed from XIXth century electricity theory as well as from contemporary percolation theory. As a result, we obtain notably non-unitarizable representations for Burnside groups.