Lectures on Selected Topics in Mathematical Physics

This book provides an introduction to Lie Theory for first year graduate students and professional physicists who may not have across the theory in their studies. In particular, it is a summary overview of the theory of finite groups, a brief description of a manifold, and then an informal development of the theory of one-parameter Lie groups, especially as they apply to ordinary differential equations. The treatment is informal, but systematic and reasonably self-contained, as it assumes a familiarity with basic physics and applied calculus, but it does not assume additional mathematical training. Interested readers should have a fair chance of finding symmetries of a second order differential equation and should be able to use it to reduce the order of the differential equation.