KAC-Moody Lie Algebras and the Classification of Nilpotent Lie Algebras of Maximal Rank

Abstract

Introduction. The natural problem of determining all the Lie algebras of finite dimension was broken in two parts by Levi's theorem:1) the classification of semi-simple Lie algebras (achieved by Killing and Cartan around 1890)2) the classification of solvable Lie algebras (reduced to the classification of nilpotent Lie algebras by Malcev in 1945 (see [10])).The Killing form is identically equal to zero for a nilpotent Lie algebra but it is non-degenerate for a semi-simple Lie algebra. Therefore there was a huge gap between those two extreme cases. But this gap is only illusory because, as we will prove in this work, a large class of nilpotent Lie algebras is closely related to the Kac-Moody Lie algebras. These last algebras could be viewed as infinite dimensional version of the semisimple Lie algebras.