Lie groups I: Introduction and examples

Abstract

The concept of a group was described briefly in Chapter 1. This chapter serves as an introduction to a special class of groups, the Lie groups, which are named after Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie.1 Furthermore, when referring to Lie groups, what will be meant in the context of this book is matrix Lie groups, where each element of the group is a square invertible matrix. Other books focusing specifically on matrix groups include [3, 9, 19].