Math Graduate Student Seminar

If you don't have a solid education in linear algebraic groups, you might nevertheless encounter the term "reductive groups" now and then. People keep telling you to think about GL_n, as an algebraic group, and that's a good first approximation. If you want to go a step further, some confusion can happen. I want to give some very short explanations on how to think about reductive groups and semisimple algebraic groups.