Reviews of plasma physics, Vol. 4 : edited by M.A. Leontovich. Translated from the Russian by H. Lashinsky. 241 pages, diagrams, 6 × 9 in. New York, Consultants Bureau, Plenum Publ. Corp., 1966. Price, $12.50.

✍ Scribed by Burton D. Fried

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1969
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 303 KB
• Volume: 288
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0016-0032
• DOI: 10.1016/0016-0032(69)00210-9

✦ Synopsis

Reviews holomorphy of what is essentially the Fourier transform of an n-point Wightman function.

The case n= 3 is treated explicitly and a rather complete discussion of the singularities is given.

Finally, A.

Visconti's contribution discusses some aspects of "conventional" renormalization theory.

As we can see from the brief summaries, the topics treated were of a varied nature and most of them involved a high degree of mathematical sophistication. The usefulness of such conferences, and indeed the need for much closer cooperation between physicists and mathematicians, is obvious. But in the reviewer's opinion a thorough rethinking of the mathematics curriculum for graduate students in theoretical physics is of the utmost urgency if the existing gap between mathematics and theoretical physics in both factual knowledge and "language" is to be narrowed.