Minimal faithful upper-triangular matrix representations for solvable Lie algebras

Abstract

A well-known result on Lie Theory states that every finite-dimensional complex solvable Lie algebra can be represented as a matrix Lie algebra, with upper-triangular square matrices as elements. However, this result does not specify which is the minimal order of the matrices involved in such representations. Hence, the main goal of this paper is to revisit and implement a method to compute both that minimal order and a matrix representative for a given solvable Lie algebra. As application of this procedure, we compute representatives for each solvable Lie algebra with dimension less than 6.