Hilbert space
The algebra of observables in quantum mechanics is naturally an algebra of operators defined on a Hilbert space, according to Werner Heisenberg's matrix mechanics formulation of quantum theory. Von Neumann began investigating operator algebras in the 1930s, as rings of operators on a Hilbert space. The kind of algebras studied by von Neumann and his contemporaries are now known as von Neumann algebras. In the 1940s, Israel Gelfand, Mark Naimark and Irving Segal gave a definition of a kind of operator algebras called C*-algebras that on the one hand made no reference to an underlying Hilbert space, and on the other extrapolated many of the useful features of the operator algebras that had previously been studied. The spectral theorem for self-adjoint operators in particular that underlies much of the existing Hilbert space theory was generalized to C*-algebras. These techniques are now basic in abstract harmonic analysis and representation theory.
Hilbert series and Hilbert polynomial
Thus formula_62 is an Artinian ring, which is a -vector space of dimension , and Jordan–Hölder theorem may be used for proving that formula_63 is the degree of the algebraic set . In fact, the multiplicity of a point is the number of occurrences of the corresponding maximal ideal in a composition series.