Cohomology of Lie algebras

This chapter is devoted to studying some concepts that will be extensively used in the last chapters, namely the cohomology of Lie algebras with values in a vector space, the Whitehead lemmas and Lie algebra extensions (which are related to second cohomology groups). The same three different cases of extensions of chapter 5 as well as the ℱ( M )-valued version of cohomology will be considered. In fact, the relation between Lie group and Lie algebra cohomology will be explored here, first with the simple example of central extensions of groups and algebras (governed by twococycles), and then in the higher order case, providing explicit formulae for obtaining Lie algebra cocycles from Lie gro…