P.E.T. Jorgensen – författare

Historically, operator theory and representation theory both originated with the advent of quantum mechanics. The interplay between the subjects has been and still is active in a variety of areas.This volume focuses on representations of the universal enveloping algebra, covariant representations in general, and infinite-dimensional Lie algebras in particular. It also provides new applications of recent results on integrability of finite-dimensional Lie algebras. As a central theme, it is shown that a number of recent developments in operator algebras may be handled in a particularly elegant manner by the use of Lie algebras, extensions, and projective representations. In several cases, this Lie algebraic approach to questions in mathematical physics and C*-algebra theory is new; for example, the Lie algebraic treatment of the spectral theory of curved magnetic field Hamiltonians, the treatment of irrational rotation type algebras, and the Virasoro algebra.Also examined are C*-algebraic methods used (in non-traditional ways) in the study of representations of infinite-dimensional Lie algebras and their extensions, and the methods developed by A. Connes and M.A. Rieffel for the study of the Yang-Mills problem.Cutting across traditional separations between fields of specialization, the book addresses a broad audience of graduate students and researchers.

In his Retiring Presidential address, delivered before the Annual Meeting of The American Mathematical Society on December, 1948, the late Professor Einar Hille spoke on his recent results on the Lie theory of semigroups of linear transformations, . . • "So far only commutative operators have been considered and the product law . . . is the simplest possible. The non-commutative case has resisted numerous attacks in the past and it is only a few months ago that any headway was made with this problem. I shall have the pleasure of outlining the new theory here; it is a blend of the classical theory of Lie groups with the recent theory of one-parameter semigroups. " The list of references in the subsequent publication of Hille''s address (Bull. Amer. Math •. Soc. 56 (1950)) includes pioneering papers of I. E. Segal, I. M. Gelfand, and K. Yosida. In the following three decades the subject grew tremendously in vitality, incorporating a number of different fields of mathematical analysis. Early papers of V. Bargmann, I. E. Segal, L. G~ding, Harish-Chandra, I. M. Singer, R. Langlands, B. Konstant, and E. Nelson developed the theoretical basis for later work in a variety of different applications: Mathematical physics, astronomy, partial differential equations, operator algebras, dynamical systems, geometry, and, most recently, stochastic filtering theory. As it turned out, of course, the Lie groups, rather than the semigroups, provided the focus of attention.