Ebook: A (Very) Short Course on C∗-Algebras

These are a minimally polished set of lecture notes for a course
on C∗-algebras which I’ve given several times at Dartmouth College.
The
LATEX version here was produced during the Spring 2011 instance of the course.
I used Murphy’s book [Mur90] as the primary source and no doubt some of
the arguments here are his.
It seem unlikely that these notes will ever be published. In addition to
Murphy’s book, there are the classics by Dixmier [Dix77, Dix81], Takesaki
[Tak79] and Pedersen [Ped82], and a host of newer books such as Davidson
[Dav96] and Kadison-Ringrose [KR83].
There is even an Encyclopaedia of
Mathematical Sciences volume by Blackadar [Bla06].
Nevertheless, I am providing these to future graduate students as a quick
introduction. Anyone if free to use them as they see fit. However, I would
be very grateful to hear about typos, corrections and especially suggestions to
improve the exposition. In particular, I will continue to tinker with them so
the page and theorem numbers will certainly change over time.
Thanks to James Ronan and Alexander Kazantzidhs for providing valuable
feedback after reading through an earlier draft.