; ti eee ae) Theory |) aera na oN) Pee rer ) oto) ci [CM rd €- 10 eee ueyeg siouids jo Aioayy oy i i po eee = wd— 1088 (continued trom front flap) —eoo— it n\n ° and also contain enough material on —h — the group 0(3,3) to enable one to start e Salam, Delbourgo, and Strathdee, and other recent theories of strong interactions. This book will be of value not only as a reference work but also as a masterful document in the development of mathe- matics, and as one of a number of mathomatical starting points for further study in the more esoteric areas of theoretical physics. Elie Cartan (1869-1951) was Professor of Mathematics, University of Paris Among this century's greatest figures of Mattsomaties. in mathematics, Elie Cartan was one of the founders of the modem theory of Lie groups, a subject of central impor- tance in mathematics, and also one with many applications to physics The Theory of Spinors was originally published in Paris In 1938, In those lectures, Cartan describes the repre- sentations of the orthogonal groups, either with real or complex parameters, including reflections, and also the related groups with indefinite metre, The treatment emphasizes the geometric Point of view and would probably be fegarded as elementary by postwar mathematicians. The result is a detailed, explicit treatise that can be understood whether the reader Is a trained mathematician or not. To keep the subject elementary, the author has stated without proof the general thoorams of Weyl; and Peter and Weyl, on complete redueibility and existence of representations, of a general class of groups. These results are explicitly demonstrated for the orthogonal groups. Concerning the applications to physics, the rotation and Lorenz groups are naturally the most important. In fact, Cartan shows how to derive the Dirac equation for any groups and ‘extends the equation to general rela- tivity. He does not, however, shaw the relation of the equation to the corre- sponding inhomogeneous group; this was a later discovery. The lectures, touch on the relation of Clifford algebras to the orthogonal groups, which has become important in recent work on the theory of seniority in atomic spectra, (continued on back fap)