Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Book recommendation

Ram Ramaswamy who runs the online bookshop Scholars without Borders, recently posted this book review on his blog.

I can testify from personal knowledge that the second half of the book, by Prof. Mukunda, is an excellent review of Lie groups, Lie algebras and representations. I attended his lectures on this topic in 1987 and enjoyed them greatly. The book can be purchased online from SWB ;-)

1 comment:

Anirbit said...

Is this an enhanced version of the notes that has been in circulation for long? Or is it the same thing?

I read through those notes by you and Prof.Mukunda during my second year of BSc.

I photocopied parts of it from the IMSc library's copy during my regular visit to the IMSc

Coincidentally during the same time when I was reading these, I had my first interaction with Prof.Mukunda while he was lecturing on phase space distribution functions in an university whose campus is just opposite the IITM campus.

I attended all those lectures and it was fun answering his many interesting audience questions. During my BSc, I always had this question as to why can't a quantum wave function be singular on a set of measure 0 and why can't there be cases where the quantum wave-function is continuous in the projective Hilbert space and discontinuous in the real space. As an undergrad it was very exciting when Prof.Mukunda, during those public lectures, answered in affirmative this question of mine from the audience.

In those lectures of Prof.Mukunda I finally understood some of the aspects of the Glauber-Sudershan function and Wigner function theory (especially his beautiful exposition of the arguments about its non-positivity). It helped a lot in my course since the lectures in IMSc on the same topic were nightmarish.