I am trying to wrap my mind around Tannaka-Krein duality and it seems quite mysterious for me, as well, as its history. So let me ask:
Question: What was the motivation and historical context for works of major contributors to the "Tannaka-Krein theory" (in a broad sense)?
Just to name a few names: Tannaka, Krein, Saavedra, Deligne, Milne, Lurie, (it seems Grothendieck should also be in this list(?)).
Let me explain some points in the history which seems to me puzzling:
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Mark Krein was a famous Soviet mathematician, but he was an expert in analysis,
it seems it is the only paper by him devoted to algebra(See discussion below). How did he come to it? Why did he not continue? -
Similar question about Tadao Tannaka. "His interest in mathematics lied mainly in algebraic number theory",
And it seems similar to Krein, it is the only work by devoted to group theory. (See his publication list). -
P. Deligne seems to have devoted quite much efforts on "Tannakian formalism" and more generally on tensor categories. What was his motivation? He is a leading algebraic geometer.
So probably the subject should be quite important in algebraic geometry? What is its importance? -
Wikipedia article starts with a sentence: "…natural extension to the non-Abelian case is the Grothendieck duality theory." What is the role of Grothendieck in this history ? And what is "Grothendieck duality theory" – wikipedia links to something not related.
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Important work was done by Saavedra. It seems not so much is known about him,
his motivation, his other works. -
J. Lurie seems to develop the theory further (see e.g. MO question Tannakian formalism). What is the motivation?
List of references (it seems original articles by Tannaka and Krein are not available electronically)
Tadao Tannaka, Über den Dualitätssatz der nichtkommutativen topologischen Gruppen, Tohoku Math. J. 45 (1938), n. 1, 1–12 (project euclid has only Tohoku new series!)
M.G. Krein, A principle of duality for bicompact groups and quadratic block algebras, Doklady AN SSSR 69 (1949), 725–728. in Russian: М. Г. Крейн, Принцип двойственности для бикомпактной группы и квадратной блок-алгебры, Докл. АНСССР, 69:6 (1949), 725–728.
N. Saavedra Rivano, Cat´egories tannakienns, Lecture Notes in Math., vol. 265,
Springer-Verlag, Berlin–New York, 1972.
Deligne, P., and Milne, J.S., Tannakian Categories, in Hodge Cycles, Motives, and Shimura Varieties, LNM 900, 1982, pp. 101-228". ( http://www.jmilne.org/math/xnotes/tc.html )
Some remarks about Mark Krein. Part of his publication list is here, strangely enough
the paper on "Tanaka-Krein duality" is not contained in this list.
I have found an article devoted to overview of his works related to group theory: L. I. Vainerman. On M. G. Krein's works in the theory of representations and harmonic analysis on topological groups Ukrainian Mathematical Journal 46 (1994), no. 3, 204-218.
It seems he had several papers dating from 1940-1949 which were related to "Tannaka-Krein theory".
He started as student of Nikolai Chebotaryov, who is famous for Chebotarev density theorem, but actually was also working on Lie groups: famous results Ado theorem
and Jacobson-Morozov theorem were obtained by his students Igor Ado and Morozov,
who worked in Kazan city Russia.
But it is not clear whether Krein was influenced by Chebotarev in this respect,
since they meet around 1924 in Odessa city, and the paper was written in 1949,
when Chebotarev already passed and long before he moved from Odessa to Kazan city,
while Krein stayed in Odessa.
Anatoly Vershik in his paper devoted to 100-anniversary of M. Krein suggests that
it might be that "success of Gelfand's theory of commutative normed rings" influenced Krein.
Best Answer
(Edited to correct mistakes signaled in comments below).
I don't know much about the first steps on the theory, Krein and Tannaka. I can just say their works answer a question that seems very natural now, and that I think was natural even then. Since the beginning of the 20th century, representations of groups had been studied, used in many part of mathematics (from Number Theory, think of Artin's L-function to mathematical physics) and more and more emphasized as an invaluable tool to study the group themselves. It was therefore natural to see if a group (compact say) was determined by its representations.
But then, I want to insist on the fundamental role played by Grothendieck in the development of the theory. This role comes in two steps. First Grothendieck developed a pretty complete end extremely elegant theory for a different but analog problem: the problem of determining a group (profinite say) by its category of sets on which it operates continuously. It is what is called "Grothendieck Galois Theory", for Grothendieck did that in the intention of reformulating and generalizing Galois theory, in a way that would contain his theory of the etale fundamental groups of schemes. What Grothendieck did, roughly, was to define an abstract notion of Galois Category. Those categories admit special functors to the category of Finite Sets, called Fibre Functors. Grothendieck proved that those functors are all equivalent and that a Galois category is equivalent to the category of finite sets with G-action, where G is the group of automorphism of a fibre functor. He then goes on in establishing an equivalence of categories between profinite groups and Galois categories, with a dictionary translating the most important properties of objects and morphisms on each side. This was done in about 1960, and you can still read it in the remarkable original reference, SGA I.
Already at this time, according to his memoir Recoltes et Semailles, Grothendieck was aware of Krein and Tannaka's work, and interested in the common generalization of it and his own to what would become Tannakian category, that is the study of categories that "look like" categories of representations over a field $k$ of a group, As he had many other things on his plate, he didn't work on it immediately, but after a little while gave it to do to a student of him, Saavedra. As Grothendieck was aware, the theory is much more difficult than the theory of Galois categories. Saavedra seems to have struggled a lot with this material, as would have probably done 99.9% of us. He finally defended in 1972, two years after Gothendieck left IHES, and at a time he was occupied by other, in part non-mathematical subject of interest. Saavedra defined a notion of Tannakian category (as a rigid $k$-linear tensor category with a fibre functor to the category of $k'$-vector space, $k'$ being a finite extension of $k$) but he forgot one important condition (then $End(1)=k$) and some of the important theorems he states are false without this condition.
After that, mathematics continued its development and Tannakian categories began to sprout up like mushrooms (e.g. motives (69, more or less forgotten until the end of the 70's), the dreamt-of Tannakian category of automorphic representations of Langlands (79), to name two extremely important in number theory). Then Milne and Deligne discovered in 1981 the mistake mentioned above in Saavedra's thesis, gave a corrected definition of Tannakian'a category, and were able to prove the desired theorems in the so-called neutral case, when $k'=k$ (I believe with arguments essentially present in Saavedra). Later with serious efforts, Deligne proved those theorems in the general case. Modern theory have added many layers of abstraction on that.