Inspired by the quantum McKay correspondence, we consider the classical ADE Lie theory as a quantum theory over sl2. We introduce anti-symmetric characters for representations of quantum groups and investigate the Fourier duality to study the spectral theory. In the ADE Lie theory, there is a correspondence between the eigenvalues of the Coxeter element and the eigenvalues of the adjacency matrix. We formalize related notions and prove such a correspondence for representations of Verlinde algebras of quantum groups: this includes generalized Dynkin diagrams over any simple Lie algebra g at any level k. This answers a recent comment of Terry Gannon on an old question posed by Victor Kac in 1994.

We construct inner amenable groups$G$with infinite conjugacy classes and such that the associated II_{1}factor has no non-trivial asymptotically central elements, i.e. does not have property Gamma of Murray and von Neumann. This solves a problem posed by Effros in 1975.

For any unital separable simple infinite-dimensional nuclear$C$^{∗}-algebra with finitely many extremal traces, we prove that $$ \mathcal{Z} $$ -absorption, strict comparison and property (SI) are equivalent. We also show that any unital separable simple nuclear$C$^{∗}-algebra with tracial rank zero is approximately divisible, and hence is $$ \mathcal{Z} $$ -absorbing.

For the classical space of functions with bounded mean oscillation, it is well known that $\operatorname{VMO}^{**} = \operatorname{BMO}$ and there are many characterizations of the distance from a function$f$in $\operatorname{BMO}$ to $\operatorname{VMO}$ . When considering the Bloch space, results in the same vein are available with respect to the little Bloch space. In this paper such duality results and distance formulas are obtained by pure functional analysis. Applications include general Möbius invariant spaces such as$Q$_{$K$}-spaces, weighted spaces, Lipschitz–Hölder spaces and rectangular $\operatorname{BMO}$ of several variables.

Kadison and Kastler introduced a natural metric on the collection of all$C$*-subalgebras of the bounded operators on a separable Hilbert space. They conjectured that sufficiently close algebras are unitarily conjugate. We establish this conjecture when one algebra is separable and nuclear. We also consider one-sided versions of these notions, and we obtain embeddings from certain near inclusions involving separable nuclear$C$*-algebras. At the end of the paper we demonstrate how our methods lead to improved characterisations of some of the types of algebras that are of current interest in the classification programme.