Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Throughout this paper, G will denote a compact (Hausdorff) topological group with identity e. When G is abelian, there is no difficulty in relating the group multiplication in G to the multiplication in the dual of G since characters are homomorphisms with respect to pointwise multiplication and pointwise multiplication of characters yields another character. However, in the non-abelian case, there are two multiplications associated with the dual of G: (1) representations are homomorphisms with respect to composition multiplication, and (2) the tensor product of representations yields another representation.
Research for this paper was supported by the National Science Foundation of the United States and the National Research Council of Canada.