Temptations of Mathematical Structures
Urs Schreiber:
I find that plenty of people are studying plenty of structures with great enthusiasm whose whose true origin and meaning is clearly unknown. I find this eerie, too, but maybe in a different sense: it’s not so hard to just fiddle around with structures and study axiom systems. What is harder is finding out where these naturally live.
When I was a sophomore at Harvard, I took the Mathematical Methods in Physics course. The syllabus in the printed course catalogue contained a long list of interesting topics to be covered, including “Milbert Spaces.”
On the first day of class, the professor gave an overview of what he planned to cover for the semester. When he got to the aformentioned topic, he said
Posted by distler at February 5, 2009 11:46 AMAs pure Math, the theory of Milbert Spaces is really fascinating. But, it turns out, what’s relevant to Quantum Mechanics is the theory of Hilbert Spaces. So that’s what we’ll do, instead…