– by Harald Hanche-Olsen and Erling Størmer, originally published in 1984 by Pitman as volume 21 (ISBN 0-273-08619-7) in their Monographs and Studies in Mathematics series.
The book has been out of print for a while. The publisher has graciously agreed to return all rights to the authors, and we have decided to make the book freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
This book serves as an introduction to Jordan algebras of operators on Hilbert spaces and their abstract counterparts. It aims to develop the theory of Jordan operator algebras to a point from which most of the theory of C*- and von Neumann algebras can be generalized to Jordan algebras in a natural way.
Most of the material in this book has never before appeared in book form. The main exception to this is Chapter 2, on the algebraic aspects of the theory. However, this treatment avoids all complications and abstractions not necessary for its purpose, making the chapter a useful introduction to Jordan algebras even for the algebraist. The material in Chapters 3–7 existed prior to this book only in scattered research articles. Thus, this book provides for the first time a unified treatment of the subject.
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Updated: 2009-05-12 14:28 UTC