grouplike elements
Let be a coalgebra over a field .
Definition. The element is called grouplike iff and . The set of all grouplike elements in a coalgebra is denoted by .
Properties. The set can be empty, but (for example) if can be turned into a bialgebra, then . In particular Hopf algebras
always have grouplike elements.
If , then it follows from the counit property that .
It can be shown that the set is linearly independent.