The Scope and History of Commutative and Noncommutative Harmonic Analysis

This volume presents a sweeping view of the importance, utility, and beauty of harmonic analysis and its connections to other areas of mathematics and science. A seventh paper, written exclusively for this volume, attempts to unify certain themes that emerged after major discoveries in 1967 and 1968 in the areas of Lie algebras, strong interaction physics, statistical mechanics, and nonlinear partial differential equations --- discoveries that may at first glance appear to be independent, but which are in fact deeply interrelated.