Homotopy commutativity in Hermitian symmetric spaces

Abstract

Abstract Ganea proved that the loop space of $\mathbb{C} P^n$ is homotopy commutative if and only if $n=3$ . We generalize this result to that the loop spaces of all irreducible Hermitian symmetric spaces but $\mathbb{C} P^3$ are not homotopy commutative. The computation also applies to determining the homotopy nilpotency class of the loop spaces of generalized flag manifolds $G/T$ for a maximal torus T of a compact, connected Lie group G.