The book arises from notes of courses taught at the second year
graduate level at the University of Minnesota. It is intended to be used as a learning tool
by people who do not know the subject, rather than as an encyclopaedic reference. The book's title
is intended to indicate both breadth and limitations: it will probably not be very useful to
most physicists or chemists, but it is intended to be appropriate for non-specialists in the area
of representation theory, such as those whose primary interest is topology, combinatorics or
number theory.
The first
8 chapters are now in a reasonably stable form, but from Chapter 9 onwards the
text changes quite often.
If you have comments on what I have written so far,
and particularly if you use this material for teaching,
please let me know.