Group Theory: A Physicist’s Survey, Pierre Ramond Cambridge U. Press, New York, 2010. $70.00 (310 pp.). ISBN 978-0-521-89603-0
In 1928 Paul Dirac gave a seminar at Princeton University. In the discussion that followed, Hermann Weyl protested Dirac’s assertion that he would derive his results without using group theory. Dirac replied, “I said I would obtain the results without previous knowledge of group theory.” His response was priceless, but not timeless.
The ensuing years saw diminishing returns on efforts by some physicists to slay the gruppenpest created by Weyl and Eugene Wigner. Those efforts were effectively laid to rest in the 1960s by numerous successful applications of group theory to particle physics. During that period, and especially following, there has been a deluge of books on group theory: by mathematicians for mathematicians, by mathematicians for physicists, and by physicists for physicists. Most books in...
