Commutation Properties of Hilbert Space Operators and Related Topics

What could be regarded as the beginning of a theory of commutators AB - BA of operators A and B on a Hilbert space, considered as a dis­ cipline in itself, goes back at least to the two papers of Weyl [3] {1928} and von Neumann [2] {1931} on quantum mechanics and the commuta­ tion relations occurring there. Here A and B were unbounded self-adjoint operators satisfying the relation AB - BA = iI, in some appropriate sense, and the problem was that of establishing the essential uniqueness of the pa