Presidential Address the Cohomology of Operator Algebras英文文献.pdfVIP

PROFESSOR J. R. RINGROSE, FRS President November 1992-November 1994 PROFESSOR J. R. RINGROSE, FRS President November 1992-November 1994 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS THE COHOMOLOGY OF OPERATOR ALGEBRAS : A SURVEY J. R. RINGROSE 1. Introduction My purpose in this talk is to give a brief outline of some of the main stages in the development of cohomology theory for self-adjoint algebras of Hilbert space operators. Of necessity, in just one hour, the choice of material will be highly selective. There will be only the briefest mention, to provide relevant background information, of cohomology theory as developed in the much wider context of general Banach algebras (see, for example, [25, 26, 27, 29]); nor will time permit any account of the beautiful results (see, for example, [14, 15,16,17, 38, 39]) known for certain non-self- adjoint operator algebras. Attention will be focused on the direct computational methods through which the subject was originally developed, without consideration of functorial methods introduced later, for example in [12, 13, 20, 21]. Even within these limitations, my account will be far from complete, either as a record of the history of the subject or as a survey of the present state of the art. Much fuller information, concerning both the theory and also its applications, is available in the recently published treatise of A. M. Sinclair and R. R. Smith [48]. The purely algebraic form of the theory, as applied to associative linear algebras over a general field, was established by G. P. Hochschild in a series of three papers [22, 23, 24] published in the period 1945-47. For