Multilinear Algebra - Use in Algebraic Topology

Use in Algebraic Topology

Around the middle of the 20th century the study of tensors was reformulated more abstractly. The Bourbaki group's treatise Multilinear Algebra was especially influential — in fact the term multilinear algebra was probably coined there.

One reason at the time was a new area of application, homological algebra. The development of algebraic topology during the 1940s gave additional incentive for the development of a purely algebraic treatment of the tensor product. The computation of the homology groups of the product of two spaces involves the tensor product; but only in the simplest cases, such as a torus, is it directly calculated in that fashion (see Künneth theorem). The topological phenomena were subtle enough to need better foundational concepts; technically speaking, the Tor functors had to be defined.

The material to organise was quite extensive, including also ideas going back to Hermann Grassmann, the ideas from the theory of differential forms that had led to De Rham cohomology, as well as more elementary ideas such as the wedge product that generalises the cross product.

The resulting rather severe write-up of the topic (by Bourbaki) entirely rejected one approach in vector calculus (the quaternion route, that is, in the general case, the relation with Lie groups). They instead applied a novel approach using category theory, with the Lie group approach viewed as a separate matter. Since this leads to a much cleaner treatment, there was probably no going back in purely mathematical terms. (Strictly, the universal property approach was invoked; this is somewhat more general than category theory, and the relationship between the two as alternate ways was also being clarified, at the same time.)

Indeed what was done is almost precisely to explain that tensor spaces are the constructions required to reduce multilinear problems to linear problems. This purely algebraic attack conveys no geometric intuition.

Its benefit is that by re-expressing problems in terms of multilinear algebra, there is a clear and well-defined 'best solution': the constraints the solution exerts are exactly those you need in practice. In general there is no need to invoke any ad hoc construction, geometric idea, or recourse to co-ordinate systems. In the category-theoretic jargon, everything is entirely natural.