Basic Notions Seminar talk on October 25, 2002

Speaker:   Jon Brundan (University of Oregon)

Title:   The Irreducible Representations of sl(2,C)

Abstract: 
I will talk about Richard Block's 1979 classification of the irreducible representations of the Lie algebra sl_2(C). There are five natural families:

- finite dimensional irreducible modules
- irreducible Verma modules
- irreducible Harish-Chandra modules
- irreducible Whittaker modules
- and one more really bad family of representations on which every non-zero element of sl_2(C) acts freely.

This talk should be accessible to graduate students -- I will start with the definition of a Lie algebra.