254A, Notes 0 – Hilbert’s fifth problem and related topics
Updated: 2011-08-27 20:34:32
This fall (starting Friday September 23), I will be teaching a graduate topics course which I have entitled “Hilbert’s fifth problem and related topics.” The course is going to focus on three related topics: Hilbert’s fifth problem on the topological description of Lie groups, as well as the closely related (local) classification of locally compact [...]

One of the most well known problems from ancient Greek mathematics was that of trisecting an angle by straightedge and compass, which was eventually proven impossible in 1837 by Pierre Wantzel, using methods from Galois theory. Formally, one can set up the problem as follows. Define a configuration to be a finite collection of points, [...]