Jacobi identity

In mathematics, the Jacobi identity is a property of a binary operation that describes how the order of evaluation, the placement of parentheses in a multiple product, affects the result of the operation. By contrast, for operations with the associative property, any order of evaluation gives the same result (parentheses in a multiple product are not needed). The identity is named after the German mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi. He derived the Jacobi identity for Poisson brackets in his 1862 paper on differential equations.^[1][2]

The cross product ${\displaystyle a\times b}$ and the Lie bracket operation ${\displaystyle [a,b]}$ both satisfy the Jacobi identity. In analytical mechanics, the Jacobi identity is satisfied by the Poisson brackets. In quantum mechanics, it is satisfied by operator commutators on a Hilbert space and equivalently in the phase space formulation of quantum mechanics by the Moyal bracket.