Topology & Geometric Group Theory Seminar

Fall 2010

1:30 – 2:30, Malott 253

Tuesday, September 21

Martin Kassabov, Cornell University


On a conjecture of Borel and Tits about abstract homomorphisms between algebraic groups

Borel and Tits showed that any abstract homomorphism between two simple algebraic groups with a Zariski dense image can be factored as a product of two homomorphisms, where one is a homomorphism of algebraic groups and the other one is induced by a field embedding. They also conjectured that a similar decomposition exists when the codomain is not simple.

I will describe recent work of I. Rapinchuk confirming this conjecture in the case of high rank split algebraic groups over fields of characteristic 0, which is based on ideas from previous work of me and M. Sapir.

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