Deformations and contractions of algebraic structures (Q2514594)

The author gives an outline of the idea of deformation theory of algebraic structures and analytic objects. She tells us that the origin of deformation theory is to classify non-isomorphic complex structures on a differentiable real manifold, and thereby to give an analytic structure on the moduli space. Deformation theory can be used to give new, but similar structure on mathematical objects. The author choose to focus on deformations of Lie algebras in this article, which is naturally compared to the the corresponding analytic theory in this case. The author gives the general definition of deformation, both intuitive and precise, and explains the concepts of formal deformations, miniversal deformations, and their construction. Then the analytic definitions of these concepts are given, in the sense of Kodaira-Spencer theory, and the author compare the two concepts in the case of the quotient space of matrices by similarity. A classical result by \textit{V. I. Arnol'd} [Russ. Math. Surv. 26, No. 2, 29--43 (1972); translation from Usp. Mat. Nauk 26, No. 2(158), 101--114 (1971; Zbl 0259.15011)] gives a stratification of the space of \(n\times n\) matrices in terms of Jordan decomposition, and a realization of a similar stratification is given algebraically by deformations. Then the author explains the opposite problem to deformations, that is contractions, where a contraction is ``in the limit'' of non-isomorphic objects. This is a another useful view of deformation theory. The notion of jump deformations in fact gives information about the contractions. Finally, examples on three-dimensional complex Lie algebras are given, based on a theorem stated as follows: If there is a contraction from \(\mathcal L^\prime\) to \(\mathcal L\), where \(\mathcal L\) and \(\mathcal L^\prime\) are Lie algebra structures on a finite-dimensional space \(V\), then there is a basis of \(V\) and an automorphism \(g_t\) of \(V\) which has a diagonal matrix form \(\text{diag}(t^{\lambda_1},\dots,t^{\lambda_n})\), where \(\lambda_i\) are integers, such that \(g^\ast_t(\mathcal L^\prime)\) is equivalent to \(\mathcal L\). The examples are explicit and rather nice, with a strong link to the author's earlier computations. I find the article really nice, and it gives a good overview of some nice aspects of deformation theory.