Wednesday, 6 June 2007

algebraic groups - theorem of Borel and Tits

This is too long for a comment, but like others who have commented I don't expect to find anything like a "complete proof" of the Borel-Tits theorem written in English. Borel and Tits have each written at times in French, English, German, but their
serious joint work has been in French and is not especially hard to follow. The actual mathematics is difficult, however, requiring a lengthy technical treatment in their 1973 Annals paper on abstract homomorphisms. (Even so, they stopped short of allowing anisotropic groups even while suspecting there were would be some good results in that case; perhaps later work by people like Gopal Prasad sheds light there.)



The underlying question originates with work of Dieudonne, O'Meara, and others on the automorphisms of various classical groups over fields (then more general rings), including compact groups. On the other hand, Steinberg gave in 1960 a unified treatment of the automorphisms of finite Chevalley groups, which I imitated for infinite Chevalley groups in 1967 using more from algebraic groups. What Borel and Tits did was far more comprehensive and sophisticated than any of these concrete investigations. There was a short survey given in French, but also an earlier 1968 preview in English by both authors (not indexed in MathSciNet) which gives a short overview of the method of proof:



On "abstract" homomorphisms of simple algebraic groups, pp. 75-82, Proc. of the Bombay Colloquium in Algebraic Geometry, 1968. (This was published in book form for Tata Institute).



As the time lag between 1968 and 1973 suggests, the full proofs took a lot of work but achieved near-definitive results in a reasonably unified framework.

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