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Quantum Theory: A Mathematical Approach



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Author: Peter Bongaarts

Publisher: Springer

Genres: ,

Publish Date: December 2, 2014

ISBN-10: 3319095609

Pages: 445

File Type: PDF

Language: English

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Book Preface

Physics, as we know it, began in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, when in the study of natural phenomena empirical observation and mathematical modeling were for the first time systematically and successfully combined. This is exemplified in the person of Galilei, and even more so in Newton, who laid the foundations of our picture of the physical world and who was equally great as a mathematician and as an empirical observer and investigator.

For a long time mathematics and physics formed in an obvious way a single integrated subject. Think of Archimedes, Newton, Lagrange, Gauss, more recently Riemann, Cartan, Poincaré, Hilbert, von Neumann, Weyl, Birkhoff and many others. Lorentz, the great Dutch physicist, was offered a chair in mathematics at the university of Utrecht, simultaneously with a chair in physics at a second Dutch university. He chose the latter and became in 1878 Professor of Theoretical Physics at Leiden university, the first in this subject in Europe.

All this is a thing of the past. From the 1950s onward physics and mathematics parted company, or rather mathematics underwent a drastic change in the way it was formulated, largely due to the Bourbaki movement. It became more abstract, more “formal”. In this respect, it should be noted that none of the great Bourbaki mathematicians, Weil, Dieudonné, Grothendieck, for example, had the slightest interest in physics. Another cause was the growing specialization in all of science and, more recently, the increasing publication pressure leading to much narrowly focused shortterm research. The language of mathematics is now very different from that of physics.


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