Quasideterminants, I

Abstract

Our experience shows that dealing with noncommutative objects one should not imitate the classical commutative mathematics, but follow "the way it is" starting with basics. In this paper we consider mainly two such problems: noncommutative Pl\"ucker coordinates (as a background of a noncommutative geometry) and noncommutative Bezout and Vieta theorems (as a background of noncommutative algebra). We apply these results to the theory of noncommutative symmetric functions started by Gelfand, Krob, Lascoux, Leclerc, Retakh, Thibon. We also continue our investigation of noncommutative continued fractions and almost triangular matrices. It turns out that this problem is related with a computation of quantum cohomology.