The discovery of quantum mechanics in the years 1925-1930 necessitated
the consideration of associating ordinary functions with non-commuting
operators. Methods were proposed by Born/Jordan, Kirkwood, and Weyl.
Sometime later, Moyal saw the connection between the Weyl rule and the
Wigner distribution, which had been proposed by Wigner in 1932 as a way
of doing quantum statistical mechanics. The basic idea of associating
functions with operators has since been generalized and developed to a
high degree. It has found several application fields, including quantum
mechanics, pseudo-differential operators, time-frequency analysis,
quantum optics, wave propagation, differential equations, image
processing, radar, and sonar.
This book aims at bringing together the results from the above mentioned
fields in a unified manner and showing the reader how the methods have
been applied. A wide audience is addressed, particularly students and
researchers who want to obtain an up-to-date working knowledge of the
field. The mathematics is accessible to the uninitiated reader and is
presented in a straightforward manner.