This book is a collection of a series of lectures given by Prof. V Kac at Tata Institute, India in Dec '85 and Jan '86. These lectures focus on the idea of a highest weight representation, which goes through four different incarnations.The first is the canonical commutation relations of the infinite-dimensional Heisenberg Algebra (= oscillator algebra). The second is the highest weight representations of the Lie algebra glì of infinite matrices, along with their applications to the theory of soliton equations, discovered by Sato and Date, Jimbo, Kashiwara and Miwa. The third is the unitary highest weight representations of the current (= affine Kac-Moody) algebras. These algebras appear in the lectures twice, in the reduction theory of soliton equations (KP ? KdV) and in the Sugawara construction as the main tool in the study of the fourth incarnation of the main idea, the theory of the highest weight representations of the Virasoro algebra.This book should be very useful for both mathematicians and physicists. To mathematicians, it illustrates the interaction of the key ideas of the representation theory of infinite-dimensional Lie algebras; and to physicists, this theory is turning into an important component of such domains of theoretical physics as soliton theory, theory of two-dimensional statistical models, and string theory.

The second edition of this book incorporates, as its first part, the largely unchanged text of the first edition, while its second part is the collection of lectures on vertex algebras, delivered by Professor Kac at the TIFR in January 2003. The basic idea of these lectures was to demonstrate how the key notions of the theory of vertex algebras--such as quantum fields, their normal ordered product and lambda-bracket, energy-momentum field and conformal weight, untwisted and twisted representations--simplify and clarify the constructions of the first edition of the book. -- Cover.

Contents:Integrable Representation of Kac-Moody Algebras: Results and Open Problems (V Chari & A Pressley)Existence of Certain Components in the Tensor Product of Two Integrable Highest Weight Modules for Kac-Moody Algebras (SKumar)Frobenius Action on the B-Cohomology (O Mathieu)Certain Rank Two Subsystems of Kac-Moody Root Systems (J Morita)Lie Groups Associated to Kac-Moody Lie Algebras: An Analytic Approach (E Rodriguez-Carrington)Almost Split-K-Forms of Kac-Moody Algebras (G Rousseau)Global Representations of the Diffeomorphism Groups of the Circle (F Bien)Path Space Realization of the Basic Representation of An(1) (E Date et al)Boson-Fermion Correspondence Over (C De Concini et al)Classification of Modular Invariant Representations of Affine Algebras (V G Kac & M Wakimoto)Standard Monomial Theory for SL2 (V Lakshmibai & C S Seshadri)Some Results on Modular Invariant Representations (S Lu)Current Algebras in 3+1 Space-Time Dimensions (J Mickelson)Standard Representations of An(1) (M Primc)Representations of the Algebra Uq(sI(2)), q-Orthogonal Polynomials and Invariants of Links (A N Kirillov & N Yu Reshetikhin)Infinite Super Grassmannians and Super Plücker Equations (M J Bergvelt)Drinfeld-Sokolov Hierarchies and t-Functions (H J Imbens)Super Boson-Fermion Correspondence of Type B (V G Kac & J W van de Leur)Prym Varieties and Soliton Equations (T Shiota)Polynomial Solutions of the BKP Hierarchy and Projective Representations of Symmetric Groups (Y You)Toward Generalized Macdonald's Identities (D Bernard)Conformal Theories with Non-Linearly Extended Virasoro Symmetries and Lie Algebra Classification (A Bilal & J-LGervais)Extended Conformal Algebras from Kac-Moody Algebras (P Bouwknegt)Meromorphic Conformal Field Theory (P Goddard)Local Extensions of the U(1) Current Algebra and Their Positive Energy Representations (R R Paunov & I T Todorov)Conformal Field Theory on Moduli Family of Stable Curves with Gauge Symmetries (A Tsuchiya & Y Yamada) Readership: Mathematicians and mathematical physicists

The third, substantially revised edition of a monograph concerned with Kac-Moody algebras, a particular class of infinite-dimensional Lie albegras, and their representations, based on courses given over a number of years at MIT and in Paris.

This book is a collection of a series of lectures given by Prof. V Kac at Tata Institute, India in Dec '85 and Jan '86. These lectures focus on the idea of a highest weight representation, which goes through four different incarnations.The first is the canonical commutation relations of the infinite-dimensional Heisenberg Algebra (= oscillator algebra). The second is the highest weight representations of the Lie algebra gl∞ of infinite matrices, along with their applications to the theory of soliton equations, discovered by Sato and Date, Jimbo, Kashiwara and Miwa. The third is the unitary highest weight representations of the current (= affine Kac-Moody) algebras. These algebras appear in the lectures twice, in the reduction theory of soliton equations (KP → KdV) and in the Sugawara construction as the main tool in the study of the fourth incarnation of the main idea, the theory of the highest weight representations of the Virasoro algebra.This book should be very useful for both mathematicians and physicists. To mathematicians, it illustrates the interaction of the key ideas of the representation theory of infinite-dimensional Lie algebras; and to physicists, this theory is turning into an important component of such domains of theoretical physics as soliton theory, theory of two-dimensional statistical models, and string theory.