Group Theory and Its Application to Physical Problems (Dover Books on Physics)

The book is in perfect shape, obviously new. Nice Dover. Thanks.

After so many years of consulting books on group theory, this is still the best reference for help of group theory as a tool for solving physical problems.

Good introductory text. Worth every penny to learn about group theory or to have around for the times when you need to look up a theorem.

The book was good as well as the printing

I bought this book in the sixties, the heyday of SU(3) and quarks, which we students all wanted to learn about (excepting one bright colleague, who refused to study anything that wasn't useful in the kitchen, as he put it). This was about the only text available. Ralph Roskies arrived at Yale hot from his degree with Wigner, and after torturting us through a second semester of Jackson's "Classical Electrodynamics" he taught a course on groups. that was probably the best course I ever took. Hamermesh was pretty sketchy when it came to Lie groups and algebras, so we used the first rate review article by Racah on "Group Theory and Spectroscopy" instead. Then, in the seventies, Wybourne wrote his "Classical Groups for Physicists", which was really nice! Throughout Jackson, Roskies (Wigner's student, remember) had kept harping that 'covariance is not a physical principle, a principle of relativistic invariance is a physical principle.' I didn't understand it, but it stuck in my head so that a decade later I did understand it. There, Hamermesh was useful: he defines very clearly the difference between scalars and invariants. So I learned my lesson. Late. Nearly every relativity book repeats some ancient error and writes "ds^2 is invariant". Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler get it right: ds^2 is a scalar. In addition, Hamermesh discusses ray representations, which are important if you want to understand Weyl's interpretation of the canonical commutation rules in quantum mechanics.

Nice book for self study

The best book now I am use. The second chapter almost drive me crazy. It is not sufficient to understand point group totally, But still helps me understand some though. I'm not going on with solid state physics, so I will just stop where it stops. The example of figure 2-23 is wrong and inappropriate, because the symmetry is higher than D4.

When I first encountered this book I was an undergrad, a junior. I flipped through the pages and could barely read the English portions, not to mention the proofs and examples. I must say that it's a tough book for a beginner; MH quickly runs through group theory in the beginning (pay attention: there are some important sentences in there that pop up later when you least expect them to) and then goes into rather a lengthy description of symmetry (point) groups, fit for a chemist or crystallographer more than a theoretical physicist. After those two chapters come perhaps the most important chapters in the book: the ones on group representation theory. There is a long chapter on theory, and then a great short one on applications of GR that's extremely helpful in understanding what you've just read. After that MH gets into Kronecker products and Clebsch-Gordon coefficients as well as other operations with GR, and has another neat chapter afterwards on physical applications. He speak about the symmetric group in great length, and then about continuous groups, another extremely important chapter. The rest of the book uses the core of what you've just learned to help you understand linear groups in Hilbert space, and applications to sub-atomic physics. Here's what you need to do to consume this book successfully: 1) Don't wait for MH to give you an example. Make them up as you go along! And make sure you fully understand each and every little statement he makes: there's no extravagant sentences here, all are vitally important and he will make use of every statement at least once to prove another point. 2) If you haven't had quantum mechanics yet, hold off on the last half of the book until you have! MH assumes this knowledge, but you can get away with your ignorance for the first part of the book, up until chapter six (and then you can skip around a little bit). 3) Know the fundamentals of group theory before you begin. It's true that MH doesn't assume this knowledge, but I assure it's vital for ease of reading. There are enough new concepts to absorb with out making your brain less permeable by not having group theory under your belt. Overall, this book is good for physicists who want to become more adept in the language of theoretical physics (especially quantum mechanics and quantum field theory). I recommend it; but I also recommend you keep at least three other texts on hand that have their own way of explaining the things MH tries to explain. It is a good idea to do that in any independent learning venture, anyway.

Pretty Good

Very good book.

It's a very good book.

Excellent book

I received a fake copy of the book. It's poorly printed. Looks like someone downloaded the scanned ebook from internet and printed it in a cheap printer. I just lost Rs.1375 for this counterfeited copy. If the book is sold by 'CLOUDTAIL INDIA' and the price is Rs.1375 , DO NOT BUY.