In a recent paper, motivated by the study of central extensions of associative algebras, George Janelidze introduces the notion of weakly action representable category. In this paper, we show that the category of Leibniz algebras is weakly action representable and we characterize the class of acting morphisms. Moreover, we study the representability of actions of the category of Poisson algebras and we prove that the subvariety of commutative Poisson algebras is not weakly action representable.

Just like group actions are represented by group automorphisms, Lie algebra actions are represented by derivations: up to isomorphism, a split extension of a Lie algebra $B$ by a Lie algebra $X$ corresponds to a Lie algebra morphism $B\to {\mathit {Der}}(X)$ from $B$ to the Lie algebra ${\mathit {Der}}(X)$ of derivations on $X$. In this article, we study the question whether the concept of a derivation can be extended to other types of non-associative algebras over a field ${\mathbb {K}}$, in such a way that these generalized derivations characterize the ${\mathbb {K}}$-algebra actions. We prove that the answer is no, as soon as the field ${\mathbb {K}}$ is infinite. In fact, we prove a stronger result: already the representability of all abelian actions – which are usually called representations or Beck modules – suffices for this to be true. Thus, we characterize the variety of Lie algebras over an infinite field of characteristic different from $2$ as the only variety of non-associative algebras which is a non-abelian category with representable representations. This emphasizes the unique role played by the Lie algebra of linear endomorphisms $\mathfrak {gl}(V)$ as a representing object for the representations on a vector space $V$.

Let p be an odd prime and let G be a non-abelian finite p-group of exponent p2 with three distinct characteristic subgroups, namely 1, Gp and G. The quotient group G/Gp gives rise to an anti-commutative 𝔽p-algebra L such that the action of Aut (L) is irreducible on L; we call such an algebra IAC. This paper establishes a duality G ↔ L between such groups and such IAC algebras. We prove that IAC algebras are semisimple and we classify the simple IAC algebras of dimension at most 4 over certain fields. We also give other examples of simple IAC algebras, including a family related to the m-th symmetric power of the natural module of SL(2, 𝔽).

An algebra $A$ is homogeneous if the automorphism group of $A$ acts transitively on the one-dimensional subspaces of $A$. The existence of homogeneous algebras depends critically on the choice of the scalar field. We examine the case where the scalar field is the rationals. We prove that if $A$ is a rational homogeneous algebra with $\dim\,A\,>\,1$, then ${{A}^{2}}\,=\,0$.

By applying the Cayley–Dickson process to the division algebra of real octonions, one obtains a 16-dimensional real algebra known as (real) sedenions. We denote this algebra by ${{\text{A}}_{4}}$. It is a flexible quadratic algebra (with unit element 1) but not a division algebra.

We classify the subalgebras of ${{\text{A}}_{4}}$ up to conjugacy (i.e., up to the action of the automorphism group $G$ of ${{\text{A}}_{4}}$) with one exception: we leave aside the more complicated case of classifying the quaternion subalgebras. Any nonzero subalgebra contains 1 and we show that there are no proper subalgebras of dimension 5, 7 or > 8. The proper non-division subalgebras have dimensions 3, 6 and 8. We show that in each of these dimensions there is exactly one conjugacy class of such subalgebras. There are infinitely many conjugacy classes of subalgebras in dimensions 2 and 4, but only 4 conjugacy classes in dimension 8.

Let F be the free metabelian Lie algebra of finite rank m over a field K of characteristic 0. The automorphism group Aut F is considered with respect to a topology called the formal power series topology and it is shown that the group of tame automorphisms (automorphisms induced from the free Lie algebra of rank m) is dense in Aut F for m ≥ 4 but not dense for m = 2 and m = 3. At a more general level, we study the formal power series topology on the semigroup of all endomorphisms of an arbitrary (associative or non-associative) relatively free algebra of finite rank m and investigate certain associated modules of the general linear group GLm(AT).