Group Cohomology - History and Relation To Other Fields

History and Relation To Other Fields

The low dimensional cohomology of a group was classically studied in other guises, long before the notion of group cohomology was formulated in 1943–45. The first theorem of the subject can be identified as Hilbert's Theorem 90 in 1897; this was recast into Noether's equations in Galois theory (an appearance of cocycles for H1). The idea of factor sets for the extension problem for groups (connected with H2) arose in the work of Hölder (1893), in Issai Schur's 1904 study of projective representations, in Schreier's 1926 treatment, and in Richard Brauer's 1928 study of simple algebras and the Brauer group. A fuller discussion of this history may be found in (Weibel 1999, pp. 806–811).

In 1941, while studying (which plays a special role in groups), Hopf discovered what is now called Hopf's integral homology formula (Hopf 1942), which is identical to Schur's formula for the Schur multiplier of a finite, finitely presented group:

, where and F is a free group.

Hopf's result led to the independent discovery of group cohomology by several groups in 1943-45: Eilenberg and Mac Lane in the USA (Rotman 1995, p. 358); Hopf and Eckmann in Switzerland; and Freudenthal in the Netherlands (Weibel 1999, p. 807). The situation was chaotic because communication between these countries was difficult during World War II.

From a topological point of view, the homology and cohomology of G was first defined as the homology and cohomology of a model for the topological classifying space BG as discussed in #Connections with topological cohomology theories above. In practice, this meant using topology to produce the chain complexes used in formal algebraic definitions. From a module-theoretic point of view this was integrated into the Cartan–Eilenberg theory of homological algebra in the early 1950s.

The application in algebraic number theory to class field theory provided theorems valid for general Galois extensions (not just abelian extensions). The cohomological part of class field theory was axiomatized as the theory of class formations. In turn, this led to the notion of Galois cohomology and étale cohomology (which builds on it) (Weibel 1999, p. 822). Some refinements in the theory post-1960 have been made, such as continuous cocycles and Tate's redefinition, but the basic outlines remain the same. This is a large field, and now basic in the theories of algebraic groups.

The analogous theory for Lie algebras, called Lie algebra cohomology, was first developed in the late 1940s, by Chevalley–Eilenberg, and Koszul (Weibel 1999, p. 810). It is formally similar, using the corresponding definition of invariant for the action of a Lie algebra. It is much applied in representation theory, and is closely connected with the BRST quantization of theoretical physics.