Book excerpt: What could be regarded as the beginning of a theory of commutators AB - BA of operators A and B on a Hilbert space, considered as a dis cipline in itself, goes back at least to the two papers of Weyl [3] {1928} and von Neumann [2] {1931} on quantum mechanics and the commuta tion relations occurring there. Here A and B were unbounded self-adjoint operators satisfying the relation AB - BA = iI, in some appropriate sense, and the problem was that of establishing the essential uniqueness of the pair A and B. The study of commutators of bounded operators on a Hilbert space has a more recent origin, which can probably be pinpointed as the paper of Wintner [6] {1947}. An investigation of a few related topics in the subject is the main concern of this brief monograph. The ensuing work considers commuting or "almost" commuting quantities A and B, usually bounded or unbounded operators on a Hilbert space, but occasionally regarded as elements of some normed space. An attempt is made to stress the role of the commutator AB - BA, and to investigate its properties, as well as those of its components A and B when the latter are subject to various restrictions. Some applica tions of the results obtained are made to quantum mechanics, perturba tion theory, Laurent and Toeplitz operators, singular integral trans formations, and Jacobi matrices.