The Joy and Pain of Skew Symmetry

In this paper, we review recent progress on two related issues. Firstly, the discretisation of partial differential equations of quantum mechanics in a semiclassical regime. Due to the presence of a small parameter, such equations exhibit high oscillations and multiscale behaviour, rendering them difficult to discretise. We describe a methodology, using symmetric Zassenhaus splittings in a free Lie algebra, which allows for their exceedingly fast and accurate numerics. The imperative of preserving the unitarity of the underlying flow takes us to the second theme of this paper, approximation of derivatives by skew-symmetric matrices. Here, we identify a gap in the elementary theory of finite-difference approximations: in the presence of Dirichlet boundary conditions, it is impossible to approximate the derivative to order higher than two on a uniform grid! This motivates the investigation of skew symmetry on non-uniform grids, an endeavour which, although still in its infancy, is already replete with interesting results. We conclude by discussing a number of generalisations and open problems.