Development in science depends on several factors. Among these, the role of individual scientists is perhaps not the most important one. Science is typically a body of collective knowledge and any increase in the amount of this knowledge is certainly due to strong interaction among scientists. Even in the past, it happened quite rarely that a single person, without any aid of others, d- covered something fundamental or opened a new chapter in science. Great figures of science history have, in most cases, had rather a summarizing and s- thesizing role. This is especially valid over the last few decades. On one hand, the amount of information necessary to achieve new discoveries, has increased tremendously. On the other hand, improvement of technical facilities has increased the speed of information exchange. These factors resulted in a degree of specialization in science that had never seen before. Most of us are experts and specialists rather than scientists in the classical sense. My personal feeling is that, even nowadays, there is a strong need for professionals with a broad knowledge and c- prehensive mind, although they may not be competitive in the number of their publications or the sizes of their grants. Every time I have met such a person (I can count these cases on my fingers) I have become deeply influenced by his or her strong intellect.

Development in science depends on several factors. Among these, the role of individual scientists is perhaps not the most important one. Science is typically a body of collective knowledge and any increase in the amount of this knowledge is certainly due to strong interaction among scientists. Even in the past, it happened quite rarely that a single person, without any aid of others, d- covered something fundamental or opened a new chapter in science. Great figures of science history have, in most cases, had rather a summarizing and s- thesizing role. This is especially valid over the last few decades. On one hand, the amount of information necessary to achieve new discoveries, has increased tremendously. On the other hand, improvement of technical facilities has increased the speed of information exchange. These factors resulted in a degree of specialization in science that had never seen before. Most of us are experts and specialists rather than scientists in the classical sense. My personal feeling is that, even nowadays, there is a strong need for professionals with a broad knowledge and c- prehensive mind, although they may not be competitive in the number of their publications or the sizes of their grants. Every time I have met such a person (I can count these cases on my fingers) I have become deeply influenced by his or her strong intellect.

The aim of this book is to give a simple, short, and elementary introduction to the second quantized formalism as applied to a many-electron system. It is intended for those, mainly chemists, who are familiar with traditional quantum chemistry but have not yet become acquainted with second quantization. The treatment is, in part, based on a series of seminars held by the author on the subject. It has been realized that many quantum chemists either interested in theory or in applications, being educated as chemi ts and not as physicists, have never devoted themselves to taking a course on the second quantized approach. Most available textbooks on this topic are not very easy to follow for those who are not trained in theory, or they are not detailed enough to offer a comprehensive treatment. At the same time there are several papers in quantum chemical literature which take advantage of using second quantization, and it would be worthwhile if those papers were accessible for a wider reading public. For this reason, it is intended in this survey to review the basic formalism of second quantization, and to treat some selected chapters of quantum chemistry in this language. Most derivations will be carried out in a detailed manner, so the reader need not accept gaps to understand the result.