Customer Reviews

Classical Groups for Physicists

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This book contains the theory of continuous groups (Lie Groups) highlighting the important points that are useful in Theorethical Physics in the manner it is used in the physicists' community. Although it intends to be an introductory text, if you have never studied group theory before you will find this book not very easy.

The author do not provide detailed proofs for everything, what is justified being a book for physicists, not mathematicians, but some proofs assume some background knowledge that a novice may not have and sometimes you have a lot of sequential definitions without examples, what difficults a little the understanding.

The first chapter may shock, because it assumes you have some knowledge of group theory in Physics, but you don't need to understand it entirely to read the rest of the book, where the author will develope better the matter initiated there.

The last chapters contain case studies with applications of the material developed through the text.

It is a good book for a theoretical physicist to have and learn group theory, although I should recommend to read it with some other elementary texts around.

The title says "physicists". This book was one of my physics texts. Yet I found much of this to be incomprehensible. Some sections are indeed very clear and descriptive. But much of it assumed an extensive prior knowledge of continuous groups, and how these are typically used in high energy physics.

I was a physics/maths major, with a strong background in maths. Now perhaps my difficulties with this book were due to my lack of background. Yet of all my texts, this was the only one that I was never comfortable with.

I used this book when I taught classical mechanics in the seventies. I found it to be very readable and with a far better coverage of Lie algebras and groups than Hamermesh (who defines scalars and invariants in the right way). The book contains typo errors, too bad that a second edition never came out. I'd like to get a copy, but not at any price! Dover, where are you when we need you?