Half Haunted: Relating the 1/2's in Duflo and Harish-Chandra
This post is written together with Josh Mundinger. We seek to understand the relations between \(1/2\)’s that appear across mathematics. From the Riemann Hypothesis to the L2 norm, we aim to see the myriad and enticing ways this unfurls; each instance of \(1/2\) connected in an anarchic network of equals. In this blog post, we examine a specific example arising in representation theory: the center of the universal enveloping algebra \(U\mathfrak g\) of a Lie algebra \(\mathfrak g\).