Unconventional Lie algebras

This book contains eight papers on representations and cohomology of Lie algebras. The Lie algebras here are either infinite-dimensional, are defined over fields of finite characteristic, or are actually Lie superalgebras or quantum groups. Among the topics covered here are generalizations of the Virasoro algebra, representation theory of the Virasoro algebra and of Kac-Moody algebras, cohomology of Lie algebras of vector fields on the line, and Lie superalgebras of vector fields. The paper by Retakh and Shander contains a generalization of the Schwarz derivative to the noncommutative case.