PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: if any of you saw me wearing black corduroy pants and a purple T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of my friend Mike wearing a squid on his head, yes, it was laundry day. Rest assured, the reality disruption was only temporary, and normal service should be resumed shortly.

Now, to the business of the day. Earlier, we took a look at rotations and found a way to summarize their behavior using commutator relations. Recall that the commutator of A and B is defined to be

[tex]\{A,B\} = AB – BA.[/tex]

For real or complex numbers, the commutator vanishes, but as we saw, the commutators of matrices can be non-zero and quite interesting. We recognized that this would have to be the case, since we used matrices to describe rotations in three-dimensional space, and rotations about different axes in 3D do not commute. Looking at very small rotations, we also found that the commutators of rotation generators were tied up together in a way which involved cyclic permutations. Today, we’ll express this discovery more neatly, using the Einstein summation convention and a mathematical object called the Levi-Civita tensor.
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My group theory teacher, Prof. Daniel Freedman, had some interesting professorial habits. When invoking some bit of background knowledge with which we were all supposed to have been familiar, he would say, “As you learned in high school. . . .” Typically, this would make a lecture sound a bit like the following:

“To finish the proof, note that we’re taking the trace of a product of matrices. As you learned in high school, the trace is invariant under cyclic permutations. . . .”

Prof. Freedman also said “seventeen” for “zero” from time to time. After working out a long series of mathematical expressions on the blackboard, showing that this and that cancel so that the overall result should be nothing, with the students alternating their glances between the board and their notes, he would complete the equation and proclaim, “Equals seventeen!” At which point, all the students look up and wonder, momentarily, what they just missed.

“Here, we’re summing over the indices of an antisymmetric tensor, so by exchanging i and j here and relabeling there, we can show that the quantity has to equal the negative of itself. The contraction of the tensor is therefore, as you learned in high school — seventeen!”

One day, I managed to best his line. I realized that the formula currently on the board had to work out to one, not zero, so when he wrote the equals sign, paused and turned to the class with an inquiring eye, I quickly raised my hand and said, “Eighteen!”

Incidentally, truly simple topics like Euler’s formula and trigonometric identities were supposed to have been learned in middle or elementary school.

Today, we’ll talk about one of the things Prof. Freedman said we should have covered in high school: the rotation matrices for two- and three-dimensional rotations. This will give us the quantitative, symbolic tools necessary to talk about commutativy and non-commutativity, the topic we explored in an earlier post.
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