Algebra of Currents--Background

Abstract

In the first part of' these lectures we will be concerned with a review of the main ideas of the algebra of currents. Probably most of you are already familiar with them, as I understand that the subject has been treated in previous lectures, but perhaps that is not too bad. The subject of current algebras was ignored for many years, and lately it is receiving probably too much attention. It has to be emphasized that many of the underlying ideas are highly tentative, and could well be wrong; we will arrange them in a hierarchy such that the first are very simple and almost certainly true, and then afterwards one can accept each assumption without accepting the successive ones.