Advanced Analysis, Notes 14: Banach spaces (application: the Stone–Weierstrass Theorem revisited; structure of C(K))

In this post we will use the Krein–Milman theorem together with the Hahn–Banach theorem to give another proof of the Stone–Weierstrass theorem. The proof we present does not make use of the classical Weierstrass approximation theorem, so we will have here an alternative proof of the classical theorem as well.

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Advanced Analysis, Notes 13: Banach spaces (convex hulls and the Krein–Milman theorem)

It would be strange to disappear for a week without explanations. This blog was not working for the past week because of the situation in Israel. The dedication in the beginning of the previous post had something to do with this, too. We are now back to work, with the modest hope that things will remain quiet until the end of the semester. We begin our last chapter in basic functional analysis, convexity and the Krein–Milman theorem.

Advanced Analysis, Notes 12: Banach spaces (application: existence of Haar measure)

This post is dedicated to my number one follower for her fourteenth birthday,which I spoiled…

Let be a compact abelian group. By this we mean that is at once both an abelian group and a compact Hausdorff topological space, and that the group operations are continuous, meaning that is continuous on and is continuous as a map from to . It is known that there exists a regular Borel measure  on , called the Haar measure, which is non-negative, satisfies , and is translation invariant:

for every Borel set . In fact, the Haar measure is known to exist in greater generality ( does not have to be commutative and if one allows to be infinite then can also be merely locally compact). The Haar measure is an indispensable tool in representation theory and in ergodic theory. In this post we will use the weak* compactness of the unit ball of the dual to give a slick proof of the existence of the Haar measure in the abelian compact case.

Advanced Analysis, announcement

I have been writing my own lecture notes (based, of course, on an array of well known references and also on some of my notes from my graduate studies) for the course Advanced Analysis. I have decided to do this because, on the one hand, there was no particular text that I wanted to follow, while on the other hand I wanted my students to have a convenient reference for the material in the course. I hope these notes were instructive to some readers of the blog.

During the second half of the course I will follows Arveson’s book “A Short Course on Spectral Theory”, besides some applications and/or examples that I will want to occasionally throw in. So I will post my notes on much rarer occasions.

Advanced Analysis, Notes 11: Banach spaces (weak topologies, Alaoglu’s theorem)

Let be the Banach space of continuous functions on the interval with the sup norm. Consider the following sequence of functions defind as follows. and for all ,   is equal to zero on the interval between and , and is linear in the intervals where we haven’t defined it yet (visualize!). The sequence is tending to zero pointwise, but the norm of does not detect this. The sequence tends to in the norm, but the norm is not in the game. Can the Banach space structure of detect the convergence of to ?

Advanced Analysis, Notes 10: Banach spaces (application: divergence of Fourier series)

Recall Theorem 6 from Notes 3:

Theorem 6: For every , the Fourier series of  converges uniformly to . 

It is natural to ask how much can we weaken the assumptions of the theorem and still have uniform convergence, or how much can we weaken and still have pointwise convergence. Does the Fourier series of a continuous (and periodic) function always converge? In this post we will use the principle of uniform boundedness to see that the answer to this question is a very big NO.

Once again, we begin with some analytical preparations. 

Advanced Analysis, Notes 9: Banach spaces (the three big theorems)

Until now we had not yet seen a theorem about Banach spaces — the Hahn–Banach theorems did not require the space to be complete. In this post we learn the three big theorems about operators on Banach spaces: the principle of uniform boundedness, the open mapping theorem, and the closed graph theorem. It is common that these three theorems are presented in texts on functional analysis under the heading “consequences of the Baire category theorem“. 

On the isomorphism question for complete Pick multiplier algebras

In this post I want to tell you about our new preprint, “On the isomorphism question for complete Pick multiplier algebras“,  which Matt Kerr, John McCarthy and myself just uploaded to the arXiv. Very broadly speaking, the motif of this paper is the connection between algebra and geometry; to be a little bit more precise, it is the connection between complex geometry and nonself-adjoint operator algebras.

Advanced Analysis, Notes 8: Banach spaces (application: weak solutions to PDEs)

Today I will show you an application of the Hahn-Banach Theorem to partial differential equations (PDEs). I learned this application in a seminar in functional analysis, run by Haim Brezis, that I was fortunate to attend in the spring of 2008 at the Technion.

As often happens with serious applications of functional analysis, there is some preparatory material to go over, namely, weak solutions to PDEs.

Advanced Analysis, Notes 7: Banach spaces (dual spaces and duality, Lp spaces, the double dual, quotient spaces)

Today we continue our treatment of the dual space of a normed space (usually Banach) . We start by considering a wide class of Banach spaces and their duals.