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Edward Witten – Institute for Advanced Study

Wednesday, April 7, 10:45AM

“The Problem of Quantization”

Abstract: Because of the operator ordering problem, there is no natural, general procedure to quantize a classical system.   Ludwig Faddeev used to say, accordingly, that quantization is ``an art, not a science.''  In this lecture, I will describe the partial remedies to this problem that are provided by geometric quantization, deformation quantization, and quantization by branes, and  some of the applications of the latter.