Combinatorial construction of tangent vector fields on spheres
The paper deals with the problem of constructing the maximal number of pointwise linearly independent tangent vector fields on an odd-dimensional sphere \({\mathbb S}_{n-1}\). The maximal number \(\rho(n)-1\) (the Hurwitz-Radon number) is well known, as is the equivalence of the task with that of finding orthogonal multiplications \({\mathbb R}^n \times {\mathbb R}^k \to {\mathbb R}^n\) with \(k=\rho(n)\), i.e., bilinear multiplications admitting a right unit and satisfying \(\| x \| \| y \| = \| x \cdot y \|\) for the Euclidean norm \(\| . \|\). This in turn is equivalent to constructing a \(C_k\)-module structure on \({\mathbb R}^n\), where \(C_k\) is the Clifford algebra of \(\| . \|\) on \({\mathbb R}^k\); compare Chapter 11 in [\textit{D.~Husemoller}, Fibre Bundles, McGraw-Hill (1966; Zbl 0144.44804)]. The author explicitly constructs orthogonal multiplications with \(k = \rho(n)\) for each \(n\). He describes his construction as combinatorial, but this is just his point of view. The multiplications have the form \(x\cdot y = z\) with \(z_i = \sum_{j=1}^k S_{j,i}x_{\pi_j(i)}y_j\), where \(\pi_j\) is a permutation of \(\{1, \dots , n\}\) obtained from a shift of the group \({\mathbb Z}_2^\infty\), identified with the set of nonnegative integers via binary expansion (in particular, the \(\pi_j\) commute), and the sign pattern \(S_{j,i} \in \{-1,1\}\) is obtained by extending the sign pattern of the standard multiplication table of the octonions or some other suitable \(8 \times 8\) sign matrix \(S\). The permutations and the sign pattern are linked by the relations \(S_{i,j} + S_{i,\pi_i(j)} = 0\) and \(S_{i,p}S_{j,p} + S_{i,\pi_j(p)}S_{j,\pi_i(p)} =0\) reminiscent of the identities in a \(C_k\)-module. If the matrix \(S\) is kept fixed, then the multiplications for different \(n\) fit together to define a multiplication on the direct limit \({\mathbb R}^\infty\), making \({\mathbb R}^\infty\) a normed algebra. This disproves a conjecture of \textit{I.~Kaplansky} [Proc.~Am.~Math.~Soc.~4, 956--960 (1953; Zbl 0052.11004)]. This algebra has a left unit and bijective left shifts \(y\to x\cdot y\), but all right shifts are nonsurjective.
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