Differential Galois Theory and Hopf Algebras for Lie Pseudogroups

According to a clever but rarely quoted or acknowledged work of E. Vessiot that won the prize of the Académie des Sciences in 1904, “Differential Galois Theory” (DGT) has mainly to do with the study of “Principal Homogeneous Spaces” (PHSs) for finite groups (classical Galois theory), algebraic groups (Picard–Vessiot theory) and algebraic pseudogroups (Drach–Vessiot theory). The corresponding automorphic differential extensions are such that dimK(L)=∣L/K∣<∞, the transcendence degree trd(L/K)<∞ and trd(L/K)=∞ with difftrd(L/K)<∞, respectively. The purpose of this paper is to mix differential algebra, differential geometry and algebraic geometry to revisit DGT, pointing out the deep confusion between prime differential ideals (defined by J.-F. Ritt in 1930) and maximal ideals that has been spoiling the works of Vessiot, Drach, Kolchin and all followers. In particular, we utilize Hopf algebras to investigate the structure of the algebraic Lie pseudogroups involved, specifically those defined by systems of algebraic OD or PD equations. Many explicit examples are presented for the first time to illustrate these results, particularly through the study of the Hamilton–Jacobi equation in analytical mechanics. This paper also pays tribute to Prof. A. Bialynicki-Birula (BB) on the occasion of his recent death in April 2021 at the age of 90 years old. His main idea has been to notice that an algebraic group G acting on itself is the simplest example of a PHS. If G is connected and defined over a field K, we may introduce the algebraic extension L=K(G); then, there is a Galois correspondence between the intermediate fields K⊂K′⊂L and the subgroups e⊂G′⊂G, provided that K′ is stable under a Lie algebra Δ of invariant derivations of L/K. Our purpose is to extend this result from algebraic groups to algebraic pseudogroups without using group parameters in any way. To the best of the author’s knowledge, algebraic Lie pseudogroups have never been introduced by people dealing with DGT in the spirit of Kolchin; that is, they have only been considered with systems of ordinary differential (OD) equations, but never with systems of partial differential (PD) equations.