The Early History of the Integrable Chiral Potts Model and the Odd-Even Problem

Abstract

In the first part of this paper I shall discuss the round-about way of how the integrable chiral Potts model was discovered about 30 years ago. As there should be more higher-genus models to be discovered, this might be of interest. In the second part I shall discuss some quantum group aspects, especially issues of odd versus even $N$ related to the Serre relations conjecture in our quantum loop subalgebra paper of 5 years ago and how we can make good use of coproducts, also borrowing ideas of Drinfeld, Jimbo, Deguchi, Fabricius, McCoy and Nishino.