Timeline for Fields of mathematics that were dormant for a long time until someone revitalized them
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Aug 7, 2022 at 6:28 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
http -> https (the question was bumped anyway)
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| May 11, 2010 at 22:36 | comment | added | Jim Humphreys | The structure of finite groups has always been a rather specialized field ignored by most mathematicians. But the ordinary and modular representation theory has continued to have a fairly high profile, though here too it's somewhat of an acquired taste and usually not directly applicable elsewhere. George Lusztig has for example reshaped the agenda for groups of Lie type and attracted new interest in the area. Here the modular theory is still far from being understood. The classification of simple groups is another matter, having reached highest intensity around 1980. | |
| May 11, 2010 at 22:07 | comment | added | Yiftach Barnea | Actually, I think that in some sense, (finite) group theory went out of fashion after the announcement of the classification, especially in America. I would say that only now in the last decade or two it is coming back. Is this just my feeling? | |
| May 11, 2010 at 21:02 | comment | added | Jim Humphreys | Yes, Hall was a major influence, especially in British group theory. I should emphasize that the first half of the 20th century, with its world wars, depression, and other upheavals, was not a flourishing period for mathematics. There were relatively few people doing real research, no "institutes" before IAS, disbanding of European research centers, few journals, slow communication. Even so, finite group theory, combinatorial group theory, Lie theory all made important progress. But it's true that finite group theory became less visible than other subjects in that period. | |
| May 11, 2010 at 19:36 | comment | added | Yiftach Barnea | You should also remember Philip Hall! | |
| May 11, 2010 at 17:30 | comment | added | Jim Humphreys | This is probably overstated. The work of Frobenius, Schur, Burnside, Brauer, and others in the first decades of the 20th century took the subject in new directions. This grew out of 19th century invariant theory but opened the door (by the time of the Brauer-Fowler paper in 1955 on centralizers of involutions) to Feit-Thompson and the acceleration of the classification project. Representation theory of finite groups has kept developing in many directions, alongside the structure theory which levelled off more after 1980. | |
| May 11, 2010 at 16:47 | history | answered | S. Carnahan♦ | CC BY-SA 2.5 |