Victor G. Kac

Simply put, quantum calculus is ordinary calculus without taking limits. This undergraduate text develops two types of quantum calculi, the q-calculus and the h-calculus. As this book develops quantum calculus along the lines of traditional calculus, the reader discovers, with a remarkable inevitability, many important notions and results of classical mathematics. This book is written at the level of a first course in calculus and linear algebra and is aimed at undergraduate and beginning graduate students in mathematics, computer science, and physics. It is based on lectures and seminars given by Professor Kac over the last few years at MIT. Victor Kac is Professor of Mathematics at MIT. He is an author of 4 books and over a hundred research papers. He was awarded the Wigner Medal for his work on Kac-Moody algebras that has numerous applications to mathematics and theoretical physics. He is a honorary member of the Moscow Mathematical Society. Pokman Cheung graduated from MIT in 2001 after three years of undergraduate studies. He is presently a graduate student at Stanford University.

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 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.