Seminarium Gamma

In this talk we will offer a panoramic view of the recent groupoids description of quantum mechanics. The basic ideas will be traced back to the original thinking by Heisenberg and, after stopping in Schwinger’s picture of quantum mechanics, the main assumptions underlying the groupoids description of quantum mechanics will be exposed. After a brief interlude discussing how the algebra of observables of a quantum system emerges in this context and explaining how the notion of state takes us back to the standard presentation in terms of Hilbert spaces and linear operators, we will devote a few minutes discussing the many-groupoids problem and its unexpected solution: the theory of stacks.