Euclidean buildings. Geometry and group actions (Q6078586)

Building theory is situated within the Erlangen program, initiated by Felix Klein, to discuss the interaction between geometry and groups. The concept of buildings was introduced by Jacques Tits in the 1950s to give a systematic procedure for the geometric interpretation of the semi-simple Lie groups, in particular of the exceptional groups, and for the construction and study of semi-simple groups over general fields. The first buildings, now known as the Tits buildings, are among the buildings, which are now called buildings of spherical type. Later, Bruhat and Tits introduced a new type of buildings, now known as Bruhat-Tits buildings, which are among the (discrete) buildings of affine type. Of course, this research domain has extended further, for instance with the study of twin buildings. The high relevance of the work of Jacques Tits was recognized by the award of the Abel prize to Jacques Tits in 2008. This manuscript describes in 7 chapters the interaction between group theory and building theory. The author discusses in this book buildings that are useful for studying reductive groups over general fields or real valued fields. He develops a general theory of Euclidean buildings, where the apartments are Euclidean spaces. This manuscript is the first part of two volumes. The second volume, with the title \emph{Euclidean buildings, buildings for reductive groups}, will discuss the algebraic structure of reductive algebraic groups and will explain the construction of their associated Tits buildings or their associated Bruhat-Tits buildings. The overview of the 7 chapters is as follows. Chapter 1 on Euclidean apartments, discusses reflection groups. Then Chapter 2 discusses Euclidean buildings, followed by Chapter 3 which discusses properties at infinity. In Chapter 4, groups of automorphisms are discussed, including (affine) Moufang buildings. Then, Chapter 5 discusses buildings associated to groups. In the sixth chapter, Examples of buildings are discussed. This includes vectorial and affine buildings associated to the group \(\mathrm{GL}_n\) and vectorial and affine buildings associated to isometry groups. The final Chapter 7 discusses applications, such as Hecke algebras, Iwahori-Hecke algebras and spherical Hecke algebras.