Posted by Martin Orr on Wednesday, 03 March 2010 at 10:08
I am finally ready to finish my series on algebraic tori, by talking about their representations. I shall show that these representations can be classified by a grading on the vector space of the representation, after extending scalars to the separable closure. I will describe this classification explicitly in a simple case.
Posted by Martin Orr on Saturday, 20 February 2010 at 21:58
I was disappointed in my last post that I was unable to prove any results about Galois descent for morphisms of functors. I have now tracked down a fairly mild condition on the functors that you need for this descent to work, which I shall explain below. Importantly, this condition is satisfied automatically by the functors of points of a scheme (though I won't prove this).
This tells us that if you have two 
I shall not discuss descending functors, only morphisms. But a small modification to the Galois exactness condition should allow you to descend functors themselves.
Posted by Martin Orr on Thursday, 04 February 2010 at 22:10
I was very pleased this weekend when I worked out how to define Galois descent data for functors of points. I was less pleased when I reached the end of this post and discovered that I couldn't prove that descending morphisms of functors works nicely.
Galois descent relates objects (e.g. vector spaces, varieties) defined over a field 
If we want to do this for functors of points, it is not clear how to define a semilinear morphism. That is what I shall explain in this post, together with how to ascend (go from a functor over the small field to one over the big field). This is all purely formal.
Posted by Martin Orr on Sunday, 24 January 2010 at 18:10
In this post I will return to the subject of algebraic tori. Just as Pontryagin duality classifies locally compact abelian groups through their characters, so algebraic tori are also classified by their characters.
In order to account for the arithmetic phenomenon of non-split tori, we need to include a Galois action on the character group.
The primary result of this post is that there is an anti-equivalence of categories between {
Posted by Martin Orr on Sunday, 17 January 2010 at 21:12
This post was supposed to be about character groups of algebraic tori. But while writing about that, I found that I wanted to use Hopf algebras, which were something that previously seemed alien to me. So instead I have written about Hopf algebras and why they are useful in the study of algebraic groups.