Abstract
The concept of freeness was actually introduced by Voiculescu in the context of operator algebras, more precisely, during his quest to understand the structure of special von Neumann algebras, related to free groups. We wish to recall here the relevant context and show how freeness shows up there very naturally and how it can provide some information about the structure of those von Neumann algebras.
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Mingo, J.A., Speicher, R. (2017). Free Group Factors and Freeness. In: Free Probability and Random Matrices. Fields Institute Monographs, vol 35. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-6942-5_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-6942-5_6
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