Heisenberg group by 90°. The other reflections are "xyx" and "yxy", and rotation by 180° is "xyxy" (="yxyx"). The Lie algebra formula_16 of the Heisenberg group formula_1 (over the real numbers) is the space of formula_18 matrices of the form with formula_20. The following three elements form a basis for formula_16: The basis elements satisfy the commutation relations: The name "Heisenberg group" is motivated by the preceding relations, which have the same form as the canonical commutation relations in quantum mechanics: where formula_25 is the position operator, formula_26 is the momentum operator, and formula_27 is Planck's constant. The Heisenberg group formula_1 has
Heisenberg group of differential operators on ℝ with polynomial coefficients, since any such operator has a unique representation in the form This algebra is called the Weyl algebra. It follows from abstract nonsense that the Weyl algebra "W" is a quotient of formula_79. However, this is also easy to see directly from the above representations; viz. by the mapping The application that led Hermann Weyl to an explicit realization of the Heisenberg group was the question of why the Schrödinger picture and Heisenberg picture are physically equivalent. Abstractly, the reason is the Stone–von Neumann theorem: there is a unique unitary representation with