A Taste of Jordan Algebras

On several occasions I and colleagues have found ourselves teaching a o- semester course for students at the second year of graduate study in ma- ematics who want to gain a general perspective on Jordan algebras, their structure, and their role in mathematics, or want to gain direct experience with nonassociative algebra. These students typically have a solid grounding in ?rst–year graduate algebra and the Artin–Wedderburn theory of assoc- tive algebras, and a few have been introduced to Lie alg