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.