Category Archives: Post Doc Poland

Policja Robots

polish police The Policja (Polish police) were in plac Zamkowy on Saturday showing off some of their equipment including cars, motorbikes and two of their bomb squad robots.

Here are some photos of the said robots…

robot1

This was quite an impressive robot and the largest of the two on display.

robot2
Here is the same robot with one of its operators.

robot3
This is the smaller of the two robots. One of the operators was demonstrating the use of this robot in picking up small packages.

robot4
The smaller of the robots again.

bomb suit
This is one of the police’s bomb suits.

Białowieża

sign I have just returned from the XXXII Workshop on Geometric Methods in Physics. The work shop was a great experience and I enjoyed myself very much; maybe all the Polish Vodka helped!

The village of Białowieża is located in north-east of Poland in the Podlaskie Voivodeship, very close to the border with Belarus. The village is located in the middle of the Białowieża Forest.

Here are some photos that I took…

gates
Here are the main gates to the park. They lead to a small bridge across the small river and the lake.

tree
When on an afternoon excursion we visited the forest itself. Here is one of the few remaining old oak trees left.

creepy tree
This tree is to be found just out side the guest house I was staying at. I think it looks rather creepy and reminiscent of Iron Maiden’s “fear of the dark” album cover.

The wildlife
The area is known for it’s wildlife including bison. I did not see any bison, but I did see plenty of mosquitoes! I also found plenty of common frogs in the forest.

frog
The common frog, Rana temporaria.

Also very common are the white storks.

stork
This stork was searching for food in the back garden of the guesthouse I was staying at.

stork2
They can be found nesting during the summer on top of houses and telegraph poles. The birds are encouraged by the local to nest and they seem largely appreciated. The storks are not exactly shy birds, but they are easily spooked.

Some more pictures

Just a few pictures about the Institute of Mathematics.

outside
Here I am outside the main door. All buildings with red signs like that are something official.

view
This is the view from my office window. You can see the The Palace of Culture and Science (Pałac Kultury i Nauki). It is the tallest building in Poland and can be seen from almost everywhere in Warsaw. It was a gift from the Soviet Union to the people of Poland.

banach
I am based in the Stefan Banach International Mathematical Center, which is part of IMPAN. So here I am having a discussion about mathematics with Banach. He is a great listener, but offered no resolution to my problem.

G-torsors

Let me quickly define a G-torsor.

Definition A G-torsor is a non-empty set X on which a group G acts freely and transitively.

A little more explicitly, X is a G-torsor if X is a nonempty set that is equipped with a map X × G → X such that
1) x·1 = x
2) x·(gh) = (x·g)·h

for all x in X, and h,g in G such that

(x,g) → (x, g·x)

is an isomorphism of sets.

Note that here we have picked the right action of G on X.

Remark One can modify these definitions to include categories other than sets, for example topological groups and spaces or even Lie groups and spaces.

Note that as we have an isomorphism, as sets, between X and G, they are equivalent objects. However, the subtlety is that there is no preferred identity point in X.

Ethos A G-torsor is a group that has lost its identity.

Once you have picked an identity element in X, you get an isomorphism as groups between X and G. This means that X and G are isomorphic as groups, but not canonically, a choice is needed.

What is the point of all this?
So it seems at first glance that torsors are very abstract objects far too complicated to be of much use to anyone. That is, until you realise that you have been using torsors without knowing it.

A good example of the use of a torsor is the potential difference in electromagnetism. When you measure a voltage, you in fact measure the difference of some voltage relative to some other fixed voltage. In practice one takes the ground to be zero, but this is a choice. Other values would work just as well. You can think of voltages as being elements of a torsor as there is no fixed identity voltage to measure against.

Energy in classical physics is very similar. The energy of a specified isolated system only really makes sense when one has set the “zero point energy”. One can only really measure energy differences relative to the “zero point energy”. This is why one can arbitrarily shift energies without effecting the physics. Actually, this is important when looking at the notion of energy in quantum field theory, but that is another story. Anyway, energies can be viewed as being elements of a torsor, you have no fixed “zero point energy” to measure all other energies against.

Physics is littered with similar examples.

A counter example would be temperature. We have a zero point temperature, that is absolute zero fixed for us.

Mathematics of course has lots of its own examples of torsors.

Consider a vector space V we can take G to be the general linear group GL(V) and X to be the set of all ordered bases of V. The group G acts transitively on X since any basis can be transformed via G to any other basis. In essence, one can take a specified basis and transform it into any other basis. Thus, one can consider all other bases as transformed versions of the initial basis. However, there is no natural choice of this “identity frame”. The set of bases do not form a group, but rather a torsor.

I will let the John Baez explain further here.

Some photos of Staszic Palace

I bought a new camera the other day and here are a few pictures of Staszic Palace.

PAN
Outside the Staszic Palace, which seat the Polish Academy of Sciences. I am stood next to Bertel Thorvaldsen’s statue of Nicolaus Copernicus.

statue
Now we have a closer picture of me next to Nicolaus Copernicus.

door
As you can see, Staszic Palace also houses the Warsaw Society of Friends of Learning.

University
Just a short walk down the road from Staszic Palace is the University of Warsaw.

Bear
If you visit Warsaw please take care with the wildlife… not really, this is one of the bears at Warsaw Zoo that are housed just outside the main zoo. You can see them from the street in Praga.

Jacobi algebroids and quasi Q-manifolds revisited

I have already spoken about Jacobi algebroids and quasi Q-manifolds in earliear posts here and here. Details can be found in [1].

In the paper [1] I show that a Jacobi algebroid, which is nothing more than a linear odd Jacobi bracket on a vector bundle, is equivalent to a weight one quasi Q-manifold structure.

A little more specifically, consider the supermanifold \(\Pi E \) build from a vector bundle \(E \rightarrow M\). The supermanifold \(\Pi E \) is equipped with natural coordinates \((x^{A}, \xi^{\alpha})\). Recall that \(\Pi\) is the parity reversion functor and that it shits the parity of the fibre coordinates. So, is we have fibre coordinate \((y^{\alpha})\) on \(E\) of parity \(\widetilde{y^{\alpha}} =\widetilde{\alpha}\), then \(\widetilde{\xi^{\alpha}}= \widetilde{\alpha}+1 \). The weight is assigned naturally as zero to the base coordinates and one to the fibre coordinates. The parity reversion functor does not act on the weights.

A Jacobi algebroid is then in one-to-one equivalence with an odd vector field on \(\Pi E\)

\(D = \xi^{\alpha}Q_{\alpha}^{A}(x) \frac{\partial}{\partial x^{A}} + \frac{1}{2} \xi^{\alpha}\xi^{\beta}Q_{\beta \alpha}^{\gamma}(x) \frac{\partial}{\partial \xi^{\gamma}}\),

and an odd function also on \(\Pi E\)

\(q = \xi^{\alpha}Q_{\alpha}(x)\),

both of weight one and satisfy

\(\left[D,D\right] = 2 q D\) and \(D(q)=0\).

A supermanifold with such a structure I call a quasi Q-manifold.

Back to Lie algebroids
There is a well established one-to-one correspondence between Jacobi algebroids and Lie algebroids in the presence of a one cocycle [2,3]. A Lie algerbroid in the presence of a one cocycle is understood as a \((\Pi E, Q, \phi)\), where \(Q\) is a homological vector field of weight one and \(\phi \) is a weight one (linear) function on \(\Pi E\). Now as we are in the category of supermanifold, we need to insist that the weight one function is odd. The structures here satisfy

\(Q^{2}=0\) and \(Q(\phi) =0\).

Now, given the initial data of a weight one quasi Q-manifold that encodes the Jacobi algebroid we can pass directly to a Lie algebroid in the presence of an odd one cocyle viz

\(Q = D {-} q \Delta\)
and set
\(\phi = q\),

where \(\Delta\) is the Euler vector field, which in local coordinates looks like

\(\Delta = \xi^{\alpha} \frac{\partial}{\partial \xi^{\alpha}}\).

So, now what about the bracket on sections of this Lie algebroid and the anchor?

By thinking of the sections of our vector bundle \(E\rightarrow M\) as weight minus one vector fields on \(\Pi E\), we can use the derived bracket formalism. In particular

\(u = u^{\alpha}(x)s_{\alpha} \longrightarrow i_{u} = (-1)^{\widetilde{u}}u^{\alpha}(x)\frac{\partial}{\partial \xi^{\alpha}}\)

provides us with the appropriate identification. Then

\(a(u)(f) := \left[\left[Q, i_{u}\right],f \right] = [[D, i_{u}],f]\)

and

\(i_{[u,v]} := (-1)^{\widetilde{u}}[[Q, i_{u}], i_{v}] =(-1)^{\widetilde{u}} [[D,i_{u}], i_{v}] + i_{u}(q) i_{v} – (-1)^{\widetilde{u} \widetilde{v}}i_{v}(q)i_{u}\),

where \(u,v \in \Gamma(E)\) and \(f \in C^{\infty}(M)\).

The interested reader can now work out all the local expressions if they want, it is not hard to do so.

The final remark must be that similar formula appear in the existing literature on Jacobi algebroids for the Lie bracket. This I may try to unravel at some point.

References
[1]Andrew James Bruce, Odd Jacobi manifolds: general theory and applications to generalised Lie algebroids, Extracta Math. 27(1) (2012), 91-123.

[2]J. Grabowski and G. Marmo, Jacobi structures revisited, J. Phys. A: Math. Gen., 34:10975–10990, 2001.

[3]D. Iglesias and J.C. Marrero. Generalized Lie bialgebroids and Jacobi structures, J. Geom. and Phys., 40, 176–199, 2001.

Thoughts about Research – a list of interesting quotes

logo

photo

Professor Piotr Pragacz, a mathematician working in the area of algebraic geometry here at IMPAN, has collected a few quotes on mathematics and science a little more generally.

Some of my favorites listed include

Nicolaus Copernicus: “Mathematics is written for mathematicians.”

Godfrey H. Hardy: “Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.”

Albert Einstein: “The important thing is not to stop questioning; curiosity has its own reason for existing.”

David Hibert: “One can measure the importance of a scientific work by the number of earlier publications rendered superfluous by it.”

Henri Poincaré: “The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful.”

And my personal favorite

Winston Churchill: “Success consists of going from failure
to failure without loss of enthusiasm. ”

Follow the link below for many more quotes.

Link
Thoughts About Research

How mathematical proofs are obtained.

Abstruse goose

The above cartoon from Abstruse Goose demonstrates the not always linear path of new discoveries in mathematics. How mathematics is discovered is not the same as how mathematics is presented.

This also reminds me of a very famous humorous quote:

mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems, because every theorem that is proved is trivial!

Richard Feynman in “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character, Richard Feynman, Ralph Leighton (contributor), Edward Hutchings (editor), 1985, W W Norton, ISBN 0-393-01921-7