Quick description
The tensor product is a way to encapsulate the notion of bilinearity, and can be thought of as a multiplication of two vector spaces.
Prerequisites
Linear algebra.
See also
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General discussion
The dimension of a tensor product of two vector spaces is precisely the product of their dimensions, so when one wishes to show that a certain vector space is finite dimensional, one can try to show that it is a subspace of a tensor product (or an image of a tensor product) of two finite dimensional vector spaces.
Example 1
Fix a field . Some notation:
is the polynomial ring in one variable,
is the field of rational functions,
is the ring of formal power series, and
is the field of formal Laurent series.
A power series is said to be D-finite if it satisfies a linear differential equation
for some polynomials
with
, and
. Let
denote the
-subspace of
spanned by the derivatives of
. Then the property of being D-finite can be seen to be equivalent to requiring that the subspace
is finite dimensional over
. From this, it is easy to see that the sum of two D-finite generating functions is also D-finite since
. But what about the product of two D-finite generating functions?
We can define a map by multiplication: the pair
simply goes to
. The subspace spanned by the image of this will contain
by the Leibniz rule for taking the derivative of a product. But this map is not linear, so we cannot say much about the dimension of this span. However, it is bilinear, and hence we have an associated linear map
whose image is precisely the span of the image of the bilinear map, and we see then that
, so
is also D-finite.
Example 2
This finite dimensionality argument is used when proving a basic result about affine algebraic groups over fields, namely that they admit a faithful linear representation (and thus are rightfully called linear algebraic groups).
An affine algebraic group is of the form
where
is a
algebra of finite type endowed with a comultiplication
. Constructing a faithful linear representation of
boils down to finding a surjection
where the polynomial ring
is endowed with the usual Hopf algebra structure. This is done by choosing carefully a finite set of generators of the
algebra
in such a way that the spanned finite dimensional
vector space
satisfies
and writing down the coefficients. See e.g Borel's book Linear Algebraic Book, sections I.1.9 and I.1.10
Comments
Can the notation be
Sat, 18/04/2009 - 00:45 — anonymous (not verified)Can the notation be explained? Is
different from
different from
?
Clarification
Tue, 21/04/2009 - 07:25 — JoseBroxAnonymous:
Usually, all those are different algebraic structures: