Sophus Lie and Felix Klein: the Erlangen Program and its impact in mathematics and physics (Q2340531)

The twelve articles in this volume stem from a conference that was held in Strasbourg in September 2012. In their introduction, the editors make clear that the scope of this undertaking was intended to be very broad, pointing to links between the ideas of Lie and Klein and developments in modern physics. They therefore single out three central questions which the book aims to address: 1) What is geometry?, 2) What is the relation between geometry and physics?, and 3) How are groups used in physics, especially in contemporary physics? One might imagine that the answer to 1) would center on Klein's ``Erlangen Program'' (EP) from 1872, which has long been taken as a landmark work for the history of geometry simply because it highlighted the role of group invariants as the core substance of interest for modern geometers. Flipping ahead to the last essay by Jean-Bernard Zuber, ``Invariances in physics and group theory'', one encounters an opening sentence that helps to put this volume in its proper context. There he writes: ``Let us be honest: most physicists of our time, even theorists, do not have a very clear notion of what Klein's \textit{Erlanger Programm} is about, and this is an understatement.'' Citing a comment by Hermann Weyl, Zuber adds that modern physicists are a bit like Molière's Monsieur Jordan: whereas Jordan was delighted to learn he had been speaking prose all his life, they are glad to imagine that their work reflects the tradition of Klein's famous text. Hubert Goenner discusses this issue directly by asking whether traces of the EP can be found in modern physics. Klein promoted the EP himself after the advent of relativity theory, and many of his contemporaries accepted the idea that the distinction between classical and relativistic mechanics was simply a matter of the respective invariance properties of the Galileian vs. Lorentz transformation groups. Goenner argues, however, that the geometrization of physics during the twentieth century has made crucial use of various fields attached to space-time structures. This being so, the editors might have wondered about the plausibility of invoking the names of Sophus Lie and Felix Klein in a book dealing with topics in modern physics. Certainly, this is a challenge that none of the authors deals with convincingly. Beyond this difficulty lies another: the actual impact of the EP even within pure mathematics is anything but clear. This issue, however, leads to many other themes that Lizhen Ji touches upon in the first two chapters, the first sketching various events in Lie's career, the second devoted to a similar resumé of Klein's. One might have expected that this discussion would have focused attention on the brief period from 1869 to 1872 when Klein and Lie collaborated closely, culminating with the publication of the EP. Instead the reader is offered a potpourri of quotations from primary and secondary sources that merely convey well-known information or, in some places, opinions offered by earlier commentators. Klein, we are told on page 16, ``made [Friedrich] Engel edit Lie's collected works carefully after Lie passed away.'' No evidence for this (unlikely) assertion is given, but in Footnote 8 on page 19, Ji repeats verbatim a quote from Arild Stubhaug's biography of Lie, a source that should be treated with caution. Stubhaug refers to a speech Klein allegedly delivered in Göttingen after Lie's death, a kind of eulogy ``that gave rise to much rumor'' because of insinuations as to Lie's mental disposition. In fact, Klein may well have made some such remarks, though even this is undocumented. But that such an occasion somehow set off a chain of rumors is an implausible claim that only served the author's larger purpose, namely to support the notion that Lie's reputation was systematically damaged by Klein and those in his circle. Sorting out accurate biographical information about events from so long ago is clearly very difficult, but perhaps Ji, as co-editor, should have taken Zuber's remark as motivation to look more carefully at the circumstances and ideas that surrounded the EP rather than attempting a sweeping account of the careers of Klein and Lie. Jeremy Gray's essay makes clear how controversial the actual historical events related to the EP have been. Indeed, its reception from during the era when Lie was still alive (he died in 1899) makes for a quite complex story. Gray's brief account draws attention to the groundbreaking work of Thomas Hawkins, whose monumental studies of Lie theory and its origins constitute must reading for anyone who wishes to gain a picture of how the modern theory of Lie groups and algebras emerged over a period of roughly fifty years. From Lie's perspective, his theory arose out of an effort to develop systematic methods for studying various types of differential equations, a topic addressed from a contemporary standpoint in the paper by Alexandre Vinogradov. Lie's original geometrical ideas had much to do with a broad new theory of contact transformations, and while all these innovations had a clear bearing on physical theories, Lie himself never worked on such applications directly. The same was not quite true of Klein, who had strong interests in geometrical mechanics, but these physical concerns were quite tangential to his EP. Gray focuses on the importance of Staudt's foundational work in synthetic projective geometry, which enabled Klein to exploit a new analytical technique introduced by Arthur Cayley in 1859. By attaching a degenerate conic section as an absolute figure to the projective plane, Cayley was able to derive the usual metric invariants for Euclidean geometry. This raised a natural question: could one similarly derive non-Euclidean geometries by utilizing non-degenerate conics? Klein showed in 1871 that one could, a breakthrough that helped pave the way to the EP. Gray's chapter leads very nicely to another written by Norbert A'Campo and Athanase Papadopoulos, who discuss the two papers in which Klein dealt with this projective approach to non-Euclidean geometry. Klein's second paper, in fact, begins with a sketch of the general framework that was later elaborated in his EP. A'Campo and Papadopoulos take up these ideas in another chapter on transitional geometry, which elaborates on the familiar idea that Euclidean geometry represents the special case of vanishing curvature among families of spaces of constant curvature. Thus, in the complex projective plane, Cayley showed that the degenerate conic given by the pencils of lines through two points -- the circular points at infinity \(\{I, J\}\) -- leads to the metric formulae of Eucidean geometry. Klein noted that the corresponding group that leaves \(\{I, J\}\) invariant has four parameters, whereas the group corresponding to a non-degenerate conic \(C_2\) has only three. This accounts for the fact that similarity of figures only arises in the case of zero curvature, which represents a transitional state between the cases of positive and negative curvature. This projective approach to spaces of constant curvature is further discussed in a chapter by Papadopoulos and Sumio Yamada. These topics were clearly of central importance for Klein's EP, but they hardly do justice to the broader ideas found in it. Some of these are touched upon in the chapter by Yuri B. Suris, ``The Erlangen Program and discrete differential geometry''. Suris discusses in modernized language such topics as Plückerian line geometry, Lie's line-to-sphere mapping, and the geometries of Möbius and Laguerre. Except for the last theme, these were all vital to the collaboration between Lie and Klein during the period 1869 to 1872. Unfortunately, the author makes no mention of the original context for their work. For example, his discussion of Lie's sphere geometry is based exclusively on Blaschke's later account, which took Laguerre's notion of oriented spheres as fundamental. This approach has the advantage of making Lie's line-to-sphere mapping injective, whereas the original mapping is two-to-one. Still, it was only some years after Lie's death that Eduard Study first pointed this out. In summing up, this book certainly contains a good deal of interesting material about geometry and physics that deserves to be read. It also contains well-grounded discussions of Klein's contributions to projective non-Euclidean geometry. As indicated above, however, this volume gives a very uneven picture of the significance of the EP for modern geometry and physics. Moreover, it fails to convey any clear idea of the collaboration between Klein and Lie that helped forge the ideas found in this classic text, which receives far too little attention in these pages.