Approach your problems from the right It isn't that they can't see the solution. It end and begin with the answers. Then, is that they can't see the problem. one day, perhaps you will fmd the final question. G. K. Chesterton, The Scandal of Father Brown 'The Point of a Pin'. 'The Hermit Clad in Crane Feathers' in R. Van Gulik's The Chinese Maze Murders. Growing specialization and diversification have brought a host of monographs and textbooks on increasingly specialized topics. However, the 'tree' of knowledge of mathematics and related fields does not grow only by putting forth new branches. It also happens, quite often in fact, that branches which were thought to be completely disparate are suddenly seen to be related. Further, the kind and level of sophistication of mathematics applied in various sciences has changed drastically in recent years: measure theory is used (non-trivially) in regional and theoretical economics; algebraic geo metry interacts with physics; the Minkowsky lemma, coding theory and the structure of water meet one another in packing and covering theory; quantum fields, crystal defects and mathematical progmmming profit from homotopy theory; Lie algebras are relevant to fIltering; and prediction and electrical engineering can use Stein spaces.

The geometric approach to quantization was introduced by Konstant and Souriau more than 20 years ago. It has given valuable and lasting insights into the relationship between classical and quantum systems, and continues to be a popular research topic. The ideas have proved useful in pure mathematics, notably in representation theory, as well as in theoretical physics. The most recent applications have been in conformal field theory and in the Jones-Witten theory of knots. The successful original edition of this book was published in 1980. Now it has been completely revised and extensively rewritten. The presentation has been simplified and many new examples have been added. The material on field theory has been expanded.

This book contains a revised and expanded version of the lecture notes of two seminar series given during the academic year 1976/77 at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Calgary, and in the summer of 1978 at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Technical University Clausthal. The aim of the seminars was to present geometric quantization from the point of view· of its applica tions to quantum mechanics, and to introduce the quantum dynamics of various physical systems as the result of the geometric quantization of the classical dynamics of these systems. The group representation aspects of geometric quantiza tion as well as proofs of the existence and the uniqueness of the introduced structures can be found in the expository papers of Blattner, Kostant, Sternberg and Wolf, and also in the references quoted in these papers. The books of Souriau (1970) and Simms and Woodhouse (1976) present the theory of geometric quantization and its relationship to quantum mech anics. The purpose of the present book is to complement the preceding ones by including new developments of the theory and emphasizing the computations leading to results in quantum mechanics.

This volume presents various aspects of the geometry of symplectic and Poisson manifolds, and applications in Hamiltonian mechanics and geometric quantization are indicated. Chapter 1 presents some general facts about symplectic vector space, symplectic manifolds and symplectic reduction. Chapter 2 deals with the study of Hamiltonian mechanics. Chapter 3 considers some standard facts concerning Lie groups and algebras which lead to the theory of momentum mappings and the Marsden--Weinstein reduction. Chapters 4 and 5 consider the theory and the stability of equilibrium solutions of Hamilton--Poisson mechanical systems. Chapters 6 and 7 are devoted to the theory of geometric quantization. This leads, in Chapter 8, to topics such as foliated cohomology, the theory of the Dolbeault--Kostant complex, and their applications. A discussion of the relation between geometric quantization and the Marsden--Weinstein reduction is presented in Chapter 9. The final chapter considers extending the theory of geometric quantization to Poisson manifolds, via the theory of symplectic groupoids. Each chapter concludes with problems and solutions, many of which present significant applications and, in some cases, major theorems. For graduate students and researchers whose interests and work involve symplectic geometry and Hamiltonian mechanics.

This book examines the differential geometry of manifolds, loop spaces, line bundles and groupoids, and the relations of this geometry to mathematical physics. Applications presented in the book involve anomaly line bundles on loop spaces and anomaly functionals, central extensions of loop groups, Kähler geometry of the space of knots, and Cheeger--Chern--Simons secondary characteristics classes. It also covers the Dirac monopole and Dirac’s quantization of the electrical charge.

In the last decade, the development of new ideas in quantum theory, including geometric and deformation quantization, the non-Abelian Berry's geometric factor, super- and BRST symmetries, non-commutativity, has called into play the geometric techniques based on the deep interplay between algebra, differential geometry and topology. The book aims at being a guide to advanced differential geometric and topological methods in quantum mechanics. Their main peculiarity lies in the fact that geometry in quantum theory speaks mainly the algebraic language of rings, modules, sheaves and categories. Geometry is by no means the primary scope of the book, but it underlies many ideas in modern quantum physics and provides the most advanced schemes of quantization.

This is a monograph on geometrical and topological features which arise in various quantization procedures. Quantization schemes consider the feasibility of arriving at a quantum system from a classical one and these involve three major procedures viz. i) geometric quantization, ii) Klauder quantization, and iii) stochastic quanti zation. In geometric quantization we have to incorporate a hermitian line bundle to effectively generate the quantum Hamiltonian operator from a classical Hamil tonian. Klauder quantization also takes into account the role of the connection one-form along with coordinate independence. In stochastic quantization as pro posed by Nelson, Schrodinger equation is derived from Brownian motion processes; however, we have difficulty in its relativistic generalization. It has been pointed out by several authors that this may be circumvented by formulating a new geometry where Brownian motion proceses are considered in external as well as in internal space and, when the complexified space-time is considered, the usual path integral formulation is achieved. When this internal space variable is considered as a direc tion vector introducing an anisotropy in the internal space, we have the quantization of a Fermi field. This helps us to formulate a stochastic phase space formalism when the internal extension can be treated as a gauge theoretic extension. This suggests that massive fermions may be considered as Skyrme solitons. The nonrelativistic quantum mechanics is achieved in the sharp point limit.

The book consists of articles based on the XXXVII Białowieża Workshop on Geometric Methods in Physics, 2018. The series of Białowieża workshops, attended by a community of experts at the crossroads of mathematics and physics, is a major annual event in the field. This edition of the workshop featured a special session dedicated to Professor Daniel Sternheimer on the occasion of his 80th birthday. The previously unpublished papers present cutting-edge current research, typically grounded in geometry and analysis, with applications to classical and quantum physics. For the past seven years, the Białowieża Workshops have been complemented by a School on Geometry and Physics comprising a series of advanced lectures for graduate students and early-career researchers. The book also includes abstracts of the five lecture series that were given at the seventh school.

This volume contains the proceedings of the conference "Colloque de Goometrie Symplectique et Physique Mathematique" which was held in Aix-en-Provence (France), June 11-15, 1990, in honor of Jean-Marie Souriau. The conference was one in the series of international meetings of the Seminaire Sud Rhodanien de Goometrie, an organization of geometers and mathematical physicists at the Universities of Avignon, Lyon, Mar seille, and Montpellier. The scientific interests of Souriau, one of the founders of geometric quantization, range from classical mechanics (symplectic geometry) and quantization problems to general relativity and astrophysics. The themes of this conference cover "only" the first two of these four areas. The subjects treated in this volume could be classified in the follow ing way: symplectic and Poisson geometry (Arms-Wilbour, Bloch-Ratiu, Brylinski-Kostant, Cushman-Sjamaar, Dufour, Lichnerowicz, Medina, Ouzilou), classical mechanics (Benenti, Holm-Marsden, Marle) , particles and fields in physics (Garcia Perez-Munoz Masque, Gotay, Montgomery, Ne'eman-Sternberg, Sniatycki) and quantization (Blattner, Huebschmann, Karasev, Rawnsley, Roger, Rosso, Weinstein). However, these subjects are so interrelated that a classification by headings such as "pure differential geometry, applications of Lie groups, constrained systems in physics, etc. ," would have produced a completely different clustering! The list of authors is not quite identical to the list of speakers at the conference. M. Karasev was invited but unable to attend; C. Itzykson and M. Vergne spoke on work which is represented here only by the title of Itzykson's talk (Surfaces triangulees et integration matricielle) and a summary of Vergne's talk.