Classical Analysis and Nilpotent Lie Groups

Abstract

Classical Fourier analysis has an exact counterpart in group theory and in some areas of geometry. Here I'll describe how this goes for nilpotent Lie groups and for a class of Riemannian manifolds closely related to a nilpotent Lie group structure. There are also some infinite dimensional analogs but I won't go into that here. The analytic ideas are not so different from those of the classical Fourier transform and Fourier inversion theories in one real variable.

Expository article; to appear in Edizioni della Scuola Normale di Pisa