Hilbert C*-module
Hilbert C*-modules are mathematical objects which generalise the notion of a Hilbert space (which itself is a generalisation of Euclidean space), in that they endow a linear space with an "inner product" which takes values in a C*-algebra. Hilbert C*-modules were first introduced in the work of Irving Kaplansky in 1953, which developed the theory for commutative, unital algebras (though Kaplansky observed that the assumption of a unit element was not "vital"). In the 1970s the theory was extended to non-commutative C*-algebras independently by William Lindall Paschke and Marc Rieffel, the latter in a paper which used Hilbert C*-modules to construct a theory of induced representations of C*-algebras. Hilbert C*-modules are crucial to Kasparov's formulation of KK-theory, and provide the right framework to extend the notion of Morita equivalence to C*-algebras. They can be viewed as the generalization of vector bundles to noncommutative C*-algebras and as such play an important role in noncommutative geometry, notably in C*-algebraic quantum group theory, and groupoid C*-algebras.
Hilbert space
The adjoint of a densely defined unbounded operator is defined in essentially the same manner as for bounded operators. Self-adjoint unbounded operators play the role of the "observables" in the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics. Examples of self-adjoint unbounded operators on the Hilbert space are:These correspond to the momentum and position observables, respectively. Note that neither nor is defined on all of , since in the case of the derivative need not exist, and in the case of the product function need not be square integrable. In both cases, the set of possible arguments form dense subspaces of .