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Many important operations and results of symplectic geometry and Hamiltonian mechanics may be formulated in terms of the Poisson bracket and, hence, apply to Poisson algebras as well. This observation is important in studying the classical limit of quantum mechanics—the non-commutative algebra of operators on a Hilbert space has the Poisson algebra of functions on a symplectic manifold as a singular limit, and properties of the non-commutative algebra pass over to corresponding properties of the Poisson algebra.
The Poisson bracket must satisfy the identities
[f,g]=-[g,f]
[f+g,h]=[f,h]+[g,h]
[fg,h]=f[g,h]+[f,h]g
[f,[g,h]]+[g,[h,f]]+[h,[f,g]]=0
f,g,h
A Poisson algebra is a Poisson ring that is also an algebra over a field. In this case, add the extra requirement
[sf,g]=s[f,g]
for all scalars s.
For each g in a Poisson ring A, the operation
adg
adg(f)=[f,g]
\{adg|g\inA\}
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