This paper aims at additional symmetries of the unextended and extended, commutative and noncommutative dispersionless Gelfand–Dickey (dGD) hierarchies. Being similar to the Lax formalism of the Gelfand–Dickey (GD) hierarchy, we construct the function [Formula: see text] and Orlov–Schulman function [Formula: see text] of the hierarchies. Meanwhile, the additional symmetry will be studied with the infinite flows of [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] function of the dGD hierarchy and one can find that only a part of additional flows can survive under the GD constraints with the corresponding string equation. Furthermore, we pay attention to the additional symmetries of the dispersionless extended Gelfand–Dickey (dEGD) hierarchy which has a quantum torus algebraic structure and show the flows in detail. The additional symmetry of dispersionless noncommutative Gelfand–Dickey (dNCGD) hierarchy and dispersionless extended noncommutative Gelfand–Dickey (dENCGD) hierarchy are studied.

In this paper, we construct the Lax operator of the multi-component Boussinesq hierarchy. Based on the Sato theory and the dressing structure of the multi-component Boussinesq hierarchy, the adjoint wave function and the Orlov–Schulman’s operator are introduced, which are useful for constructing the additional symmetry of the multi-component Boussinesq hierarchy. Besides, the additional flows can commute with the original flows, and these flows form an infinite dimensional [Formula: see text] algebra. Taking the above discussion into account, we mainly study the additional symmetry flows and the generating function for both strongly and weakly multi-component of the Boussinesq hierarchies. By the way, using the [Formula: see text] constraint of the multi-component Boussinesq hierarchy, the string equation can be derived.