Mark Pankov – författare

Wigner's theorem is a fundamental part of the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics. The theorem characterizes unitary and anti-unitary operators as symmetries of quantum mechanical systems, and is a key result when relating preserver problems to quantum mechanics. At the heart of this book is a geometric approach to Wigner-type theorems, unifying both classical and more recent results. Readers are initiated in a wide range of topics from geometric transformations of Grassmannians to lattices of closed subspaces, before moving on to a discussion of applications. An introduction to all the key aspects of the basic theory is included as are plenty of examples, making this book a useful resource for beginning graduate students and non-experts, as well as a helpful reference for specialist researchers.

Buildings are combinatorial constructions successfully exploited to study groups of various types. The vertex set of a building can be naturally decomposed into subsets called Grassmannians. The book contains both classical and more recent results on Grassmannians of buildings of classical types. It gives a modern interpretation of some classical results from the geometry of linear groups. The presented methods are applied to some geometric constructions non-related to buildings — Grassmannians of infinite-dimensional vector spaces and the sets of conjugate linear involutions.The book is self-contained and the requirement for the reader is a knowledge of basic algebra and graph theory. This makes it very suitable for use in a course for graduate students.