magfrump comments on Ask an experimental physicist - Less Wrong

35 Post author: RolfAndreassen 08 June 2012 11:43PM

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Comment author: magfrump 13 June 2012 05:14:46PM 0 points [-]

"locally compact" implies you have a topology--maybe I should be saying "topological group" rather than "Lie group," though.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 June 2012 06:19:12PM 0 points [-]

All Lie groups already have a topology. They're manifolds, after all.

Comment author: magfrump 13 June 2012 06:26:56PM 0 points [-]

Yes. My original statement was that harmonic analysis is limited to Lie groups. jsteinhardt observed that any locally compact abelian group can have harmonic analysis done on it--some of these (say, p-adic groups) are not Lie groups, since they have no smooth structure, though they are still topological groups.

So I was trying to be less specific by changing my term from Lie group to topological group.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 June 2012 06:30:10PM 0 points [-]

Oh. That makes more sense.