Some remarks on producing Hopf algebras

We report some observations concerning two well-known approaches to construction of quantum groups. Thus, starting from a bialgebra of inhomogeneous type and imposing quadratic, cubic or quartic commutation relations on a subset of its generators we come, in each case, to aq-deformed universal enveloping algebra of a certain simple Lie algebra. An interesting correlation between the order of initial commutation relations and the Cartan matrix of the resulting algebra is observed. Another example demonstrates that the bialgebra structure ofsl _q (2) can be completely determined by requiring theq-oscillator algebra to be its covariant comodule, in analogy with Manin's approach to defineSL _q (2) as a symmetry algebra of the bosonic and fermionic quantum planes.Presented at the 4th Colloquium Quantum Groups and Integrable Systems, Prague, 22–24 June 1995.This work was supported in part by International Sciences Foundation (grant RFF-300) and by Russian Basic Research Foundation (grant 95-02-05679).I acknowledge helpful discussions with A. Isaev, P. Kulish, V. Lyakhovsky, O. Ogievetsky, P. Pyatov, and V. Tolstoy.