Jean-Philippe Furter

joint work with H. Kraft

In 1981, Shafarevich shows that the special automorphism group of the n-dimensional affine space is simple, in the sense that it does not contain a non-trivial closed normal subgroup. The proof is based on the fact that the corresponding Lie algebra is simple, together with a theorem which claims that a closed subgroup of a connected ind-group G with the same Lie algebra is equal to G. We construct a counterexample.