Victor G. Kac - Böcker

This is the third, substantially revised edition of this important monograph. The book is concerned with Kac-Moody algebras, a particular class of infinite-dimensional Lie algebras, and their representations. It is based on courses given over a number of years at MIT and in Paris, and is sufficiently self-contained and detailed to be used for graduate courses. Each chapter begins with a motivating discussion and ends with a collection of exercises, with hints to the more challenging problems.

Based on the third International Conference on Symmetries, Differential Equations and Applications (SDEA-III), this proceedings volume highlights recent important advances and trends in the applications of Lie groups, including a broad area of topics in interdisciplinary studies, ranging from mathematical physics to financial mathematics. The selected and peer-reviewed contributions gathered here cover Lie theory and symmetry methods in differential equations, Lie algebras and Lie pseudogroups, super-symmetry and super-integrability, representation theory of Lie algebras, classification problems, conservation laws, and geometrical methods.The SDEA III, held in honour of the Centenary of Noether’s Theorem, proven by the prominent German mathematician Emmy Noether, at Istanbul Technical University in August 2017 provided a productive forum for academic researchers, both junior and senior, and students to discuss and share the latest developments in the theory andapplications of Lie symmetry groups.This work has an interdisciplinary appeal and will be a valuable read for researchers in mathematics, mechanics, physics, engineering, medicine and finance.

This volume, dedicated to the memory of the great American mathematician Bertram Kostant (May 24, 1928 – February 2, 2017), is a collection of 19 invited papers by leading mathematicians working in Lie theory, representation theory, algebra, geometry, and mathematical physics.

Based on the third International Conference on Symmetries, Differential Equations and Applications (SDEA-III), this proceedings volume highlights recent important advances and trends in the applications of Lie groups, including a broad area of topics in interdisciplinary studies, ranging from mathematical physics to financial mathematics. The selected and peer-reviewed contributions gathered here cover Lie theory and symmetry methods in differential equations, Lie algebras and Lie pseudogroups, super-symmetry and super-integrability, representation theory of Lie algebras, classification problems, conservation laws, and geometrical methods.The SDEA III, held in honour of the Centenary of Noether’s Theorem, proven by the prominent German mathematician Emmy Noether, at Istanbul Technical University in August 2017 provided a productive forum for academic researchers, both junior and senior, and students to discuss and share the latest developments in the theory andapplications of Lie symmetry groups.This work has an interdisciplinary appeal and will be a valuable read for researchers in mathematics, mechanics, physics, engineering, medicine and finance.

The first edition of this book is a collection of a series of lectures given by Professor Victor Kac at the TIFR, Mumbai, India in December 1985 and January 1986. These lectures focus on the idea of a highest weight representation, which goes through four different incarnations.The first is the canonical commutation relations of the infinite dimensional Heisenberg Algebra (= oscillator algebra). The second is the highest weight representations of the Lie algebra gℓ∞ of infinite matrices, along with their applications to the theory of soliton equations, discovered by Sato and Date, Jimbo, Kashiwara and Miwa. The third is the unitary highest weight representations of the current (= affine Kac-Moody) algebras. These Lie algebras appear in the lectures in connection to the Sugawara construction, which is the main tool in the study of the fourth incarnation of the main idea, the theory of the highest weight representations of the Virasoro algebra. In particular, the book provides a complete proof of the Kac determinant formula, the key result in representation theory of the Virasoro algebra.The second edition of this book incorporates, as its first part, the largely unchanged text of the first edition, while its second part is the collection of lectures on vertex algebras, delivered by Professor Kac at the TIFR in January 2003. The basic idea of these lectures was to demonstrate how the key notions of the theory of vertex algebras — such as quantum fields, their normal ordered product and lambda-bracket, energy-momentum field and conformal weight, untwisted and twisted representations — simplify and clarify the constructions of the first edition of the book.This book should be very useful for both mathematicians and physicists. To mathematicians, it illustrates the interaction of the key ideas of the representation theory of infinite dimensional Lie algebras and of the theory of vertex algebras; and to physicists, these theories are turning into an important component of such domains of theoretical physics as soliton theory, conformal field theory, the theory of two-dimensional statistical models, and string theory.

The first edition of this book is a collection of a series of lectures given by Professor Victor Kac at the TIFR, Mumbai, India in December 1985 and January 1986. These lectures focus on the idea of a highest weight representation, which goes through four different incarnations.The first is the canonical commutation relations of the infinite dimensional Heisenberg Algebra (= oscillator algebra). The second is the highest weight representations of the Lie algebra gℓ∞ of infinite matrices, along with their applications to the theory of soliton equations, discovered by Sato and Date, Jimbo, Kashiwara and Miwa. The third is the unitary highest weight representations of the current (= affine Kac-Moody) algebras. These Lie algebras appear in the lectures in connection to the Sugawara construction, which is the main tool in the study of the fourth incarnation of the main idea, the theory of the highest weight representations of the Virasoro algebra. In particular, the book provides a complete proof of the Kac determinant formula, the key result in representation theory of the Virasoro algebra.The second edition of this book incorporates, as its first part, the largely unchanged text of the first edition, while its second part is the collection of lectures on vertex algebras, delivered by Professor Kac at the TIFR in January 2003. The basic idea of these lectures was to demonstrate how the key notions of the theory of vertex algebras — such as quantum fields, their normal ordered product and lambda-bracket, energy-momentum field and conformal weight, untwisted and twisted representations — simplify and clarify the constructions of the first edition of the book.This book should be very useful for both mathematicians and physicists. To mathematicians, it illustrates the interaction of the key ideas of the representation theory of infinite dimensional Lie algebras and of the theory of vertex algebras; and to physicists, these theories are turning into an important component of such domains of theoretical physics as soliton theory, conformal field theory, the theory of two-dimensional statistical models, and string theory.