Algebra I. Basic notions of algebra. Transl. from the Russian by M. Reid (Q922621)

This is one of the few mathematical books, the reviewer has read from cover to cover (some others are by Hermann Weyl). The main handicap of the book is being too short -- and its existence in a subseries of an Encyclopedia (you will not find things like local rings or Iwasawa modules, Serre's conjecture or at least Sylow groups). It should be regarded as the author's own view on algebra, an essay in mathematics. The main merit is that nearly on every page you will find some unexpected insights, e.g., E. Noether's theorem on symmetries and conservation laws is placed just at the beginning of the chapter ``The notion of a group'' (as a transformation group). You will find Bose-Einstein and Fermi-Dirac statistics as examples for the two 1-dimensional representations of the symmetric group \(S_n\) (representations are introduced as modules over noncommutative rings). The curvature tensor of a four-dimensional Riemannian manifold is given as a representation of \(\mathrm{SO}(4)\), formal groups of a field \(K\) of characteristic zero are equivalent to finite-dimensional Lie algebras over \(K\), etc. The reviewer feels that the author could have given more and more examples -- most of them known to the mathematical community, but not in this context. The book is almost entirely in theorem-example style, there are few proofs (and these mostly as short as aphorisms of the author or beginning with ``it is easy to see...''). Nevertheless, Bourbaki's historical advances are acknowledged -- and there are two chapters on ``Categories'' and ``Homological Algebra'' (here you can find a proof of Brouwer's fixed point theorem). The main thesis of the book is that algebra gives quantities to coordinatize some type of objects. The two main examples are quantum mechanics and finite geometry. Knowing the author's outstanding contributions to number theory and algebraic geometry [see his ``Collected Works'' (1989; Zbl 0669.12001)] one feels a reservedness to give examples from these fields. Nevertheless you will find excurses about divisibility in \(\mathbb Z[\sqrt{-5}]\) or the theorem of Riemann-Roch(-Hirzebruch). But the book ends with a chapter ``K-theory'' giving the results of Merkur'ev-Suslin and some conjectures on the interplay between K-groups and zeta-functions. There are not many other conjectures to be found in the book, and nearly no ``open problems''. One of these is the existence of a theory of non- associative algebras. Written essentially in 1984 the growing bloom of these problems was not to be foreseen (look at section ``17'' in ``Zentralblatt''). The same can be said to the author's remark that the theory of infinite-dimensional Lie groups is ``at present`` on a heuristic level. On the other side ``superalgebras'' are discussed at length (defined as \(\mathbb Z_2\)-graded algebras). Clifford algebras are introduced as special superalgebras (according to the quadratic form \(F(x_1,\dots,x_n)=x^2_1+\dots+x^2_n\) -- not \(F=x^2_1+x^2_n\) as in the definition given in the book). The case \(n=2\) conjures up the Laplace operator and at last the Cauchy-Riemann equations. One of the highlights of the book, justifying the publishers own estimate of their product, that this work is in the succession of the expository tradition of such books as \textit{H. Weyl}'s ``The classical groups'' (1939; Zbl 0020.20601) is the explanation of the famous Helmholtz-Lie theorem giving an intrinsic characterization of Riemannian manifolds with constant curvature introducing the flag manifold. The transitivity of the action of a group of motions on the set of flags is called the ``complete isotropy axiom''. The author says that he follows \textit{H. Weyl}'s ``slightly difficult'' book ``Mathematische Analyse des Raumproblems.'' Berlin: Springer (1923; JFM 49.0494.02), reprinted Darmstadt 1977, Aix-en-Provence (2015; Zbl 1341.01057). You will find a lot of minor misprints like above, or, e.g., the mass of the proton in MeV -- in a wonderful chapter on the classification of elementary particles illustrating the Clebsch-Gordan formula by figures of the Zeeman effect. There are some more indications that the editing of this translation was not very careful: pp. 83, 84, 85 ``a \(n\)-dimensional space'' and ``an \(n\)-dimensional space'' neatly alternate (in a nice example for ``coordinatization'' deriving the ``Fundamental Theorem of Projective Geometry'' from ``Wedderburn's Theorem''), and one of the publisher's greatest merits seems to be their (!) first edition (1870 (!)) of Gauß's ``Disquisitiones Arithmeticae''. Nevertheless, the reviewer is eagerly awaiting ``Algebra II''.