Topological generators of Abelian Lie groups and hypercyclic finitely generated Abelian semigroups of matrices (Q664761)

\textit{N. S. Feldman} [J. Math. Anal. Appl. 346, No. 1, 82--98 (2008; Zbl 1148.47008)] introduced the concept of hypercyclic abelian finitely generated semigroup of bounded linear operators. It generalizes the concept of hypercyclic operator in linear dynamics. While hypercyclic bounded linear operators may only occur in infinite-dimensional separable spaces, hypercyclicity of semigroups may also appear in finite-dimensional spaces. Feldman raised the problem to determine the minimal number of generators for an abelian semigroup of matrices that is hypercyclic and obtained some results. Much research has been done recently on this topic, among others, by Ayadi, Costakis, Hadjiloucas, Marzougui and Manoussos in the abelian case and by Abels, Vinberg and Javaheri in the non-abelian case. In this paper, the authors determine the minimal number of generators of a finitely generated group or semigroup of commuting matrices with real or complex entries with a dense or a somewhere dense orbit for several classes of matrices. They prove that there is no difference between dense and somewhere dense orbits and between groups or semigroups. Their methods are different from the previous work in this direction. They use methods from the theories of algebraic groups and algebraic actions. This article brings together results about the density of semigroups of abelian Lie semigroups, the minimal number of topological generators of abelian Lie groups, and the main result of the paper about actions of algebraic groups. The proof utilizes a basic theorem about actions on algebraic groups due to A. Borel and J. Tits. Applications to finitely generated hypercyclic abelian semigroups and groups of matrices are given in the last section.