A homogeneous description of inhomogeneous Minkowski groups

Other geometric groups, including crystallographic groups (20H15) Orthogonal and unitary groups in metric geometry (51F25) Analytic geometry with other transformation groups (51N25)

Review text

The motion group of an n-dimensional metric geometry is \({\mathfrak M}(A)=0(A)\cdot {\mathfrak T}(A)\), where A is an n-dimensional regular vector space, 0(A) the group of motions fixing the origin, and \({\mathfrak T}(A)\) is the translation group. This is the familiar description of isometries by inhomogeneous coordinates. For many purposes a description of the same group by homogeneous coordinates or as a subgroup of the general linear group is more convenient. In order to obtain the desired description we consider the space \(V=A\oplus R\), where R is the radical of V and dim R\(=1\). Let \(0^*(V)\) be the subgroup of isometries whose elements fix every vector in R, \(0^+(V)\) the subgroup of 0(V) whose elements have determinant 1 and \(Z=\{1_ V,-1_ V\}.\) Then we obtain the following results: \(0^*(V)\cong {\mathfrak M}(A),0(V)/Z\cong {\mathfrak S}(A),\) where \({\mathfrak S}(A)\) is the group of similarities of A, \(0^+(V)\cong {\mathfrak M}(A)\) if dim V is odd and \(0^+(V)/Z\cong {\mathfrak M}^+(V)\) if dim V is even.

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