Self adjoint Operator

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. In mathematics, on a finite-dimensional inner product space, a self-adjoint operator is one that is its own adjoint, or, equivalently, one whose matrix is Hermitian, where a Hermitian matrix is one which is equal to its own conjugate transpose. By the finite-dimensional spectral theorem such operators have an orthonormal basis in which the operator can be represented as a diagonal matrix with entries in the real numbers. In this article, we consider generalizations of this concept to operators on Hilbert spaces of arbitrary dimension. Self-adjoint operators are used in functional analysis and quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics their importance lies in the fact that in the Dirac-von Neumann formulation of quantum mechanics, physical observables such as position, momentum, angular momentum and spin are represented by self-adjoint operators on a Hilbert space.

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